In support of the rage of man

[bennyboy]

Rage supporter, I have one question for you: do you support the natural rage to occur in any situation? 

Let me set up a scenario for you, one in which I believe the rage should be supported.

It is a customer and store employee scenario.

Let's the say the customer is being a complete twat. Should the store employee give into his natural rage and say whatever he wants to the customer?

My answer is yes, but is it also yours?

My answer to the first question is not so much that I'd support natural rage all the time-- restraint is expected. However, except for real psychos, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Sometimes, people fuck with a man. They can see the storm brewing, but they are on some rant of their own and don't think he'll start swinging. Then he does start swinging (or even just shouting), and it's a bad day for everyone.

I can give a few examples of my own rage (I've full-on triggered maybe half a dozen times in my life), but I'll start with one. Keep in mind I live in Korea. I was approaching a tunnel, and the posted speed sign for the tunnel was 40km, which is quite slow, so I was slowing down. I was also changing lanes, because you aren't allowed to change lanes inside the tunnel. I had my signal light on for at least a couple of seconds. In my rearview, I see some guy in a sports car bombing toward me doing about 100 in the lane I was moving to. But I'm already in the lane well before he arrives at my position, and I'm very clearly going the speed limit.

He goes fucking crazy honking at me-- obviously, he didn't intend to slow down to the posted speed, and he felt I was cutting him off even though he honked at me not to. We get out of the tunnel (both doing the posted speed of 40). He quickly pulls around me, still honking, STOPS in front of me, and gets out of his car. It's a young punk, a bit gangster-looking, too young to own a car like that unless his daddy's a CEO for Samsung or something. He approaches my car, screaming bloody murder in Korean.

That's when I trigger. I get out of the car shouting, and believe me I had every intention of putting the fucker in the hospital. There was nothing in me that had the capacity to resist the urge to introduce his face to the pavement except his fairly remarkable running speed. He saw a big fucking white dude charging him in an army coat (I'm not IN the army, just have the coat because it's like the best coat ever). He changed his mind about how tough he was, jumped in his car, and drove off with a bennyboy-sized fist indentation on his trunk. My guess is that since I was driving an old beater, and since I was actually driving the speed limit, he thought I was a female driver.

Now, legally, I was all kinds of wrong if I got my hands on him. But I think that threat needs to be there-- we shouldn't be so cocksure in our expectations of civility that we'll just dump on some stranger, and ignore the constant implied threat there-- that if you want to tee off on someone, they might decide to rip off your arm and beat you to fucking death with it.

And that's one thing we never talk about, because it's considered irrelevant-- what was going on in the environment just before some guy's fight/flight flipped into full-on-nuclear destroy mode? Was someone riding him? Did he give them warning? Cuz in my case, I'll almost always try to walk away-- it's when someone makes a point of initiating a confrontation, and will not allow me to walk away because they think they just HAVE to be allowed to complete their emotional vent, that they discover their idea of right behavior isn't going to save them from having a really bad day.

I've raged at my wife a couple times in my life. One time I warned her "I need to go for a walk" but she blocked me: "I want to talk about this now." I said, "Look. . I'm getting upset, and I shouldn't be having this conversation. I'll come back later and we can finish this." Then again: "I'm telling you. I'm losing control here, and you need to stop talking to me like this!!!" But she was on a rant about something and wouldn't / couldn't let it go. That's when I went full nerd-gorilla and tossed a TV across the room-- the old Sony Trinitron tube TV, that you couldn't lift without about a liter of adrenaline in your blood or about 3 friends. It smashed in a pretty spectacular fashion and left a pretty good dent in the floor. She decided then that maybe I did need to take a walk after all.

Was I "right?" No fucking way. It would have been better if I hadn't triggered-- I mean. . . at the very least, I lost an expensive TV. But after that, she knew-- if I'm trying to escape the environment, and I tell her I'm getting triggered. . . maybe standing between me and the door isn't the best idea. If you trap an angry gorilla, who's right by the societal standards of the day doesn't really matter-- the physics of gorilla vs. environment are on a higher level of reality than that.