Moral Outrage

 

Moral outrage has been defined as a response of anger and disgust in relation to a perceived moral violation…..When moral outrage is episodic and regulated, it can be a useful instigator of ethical action.  There is plenty to be outraged about in the world, and our anger can give us the energy we need to confront injustice.  Strong emotions can help us recognize an immoral situation and can motivate us to intervene, take a stand, even risk our lives to benefit others…However, when moral outrage is self-serving, chronic, or unregulated – when it becomes the very lens through which we view the world-it can be addictive and divisive.

Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge:  Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

 

Ill will, when dramatized in a human being, becomes hatred walking on the earth…hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater….above and beyond all else it must be borne in mind that hatred tends to dry up the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater, so that his resourcefulness becomes completely focused on the negative aspects of his environment.  The urgent needs of the personality for creative expression are starved to death.

Howard Thurman, Jesus of the Disinherited

 

This is a time for moral outrage.  Outrage over the four years of corruption, deceit, racism, misogyny, and ignorance that has run our country for the last four years.  Outrage over the political and media complicity that has allowed this to continue unchecked. Outrage over the violence against people of color, children in cages at the border, environmental destruction, tax cuts for the wealthy, the tear gassing of peaceful protesters, the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary dead and ill during the pandemic.  The storming of the capital by an angry mob incited by the President, the barrage of lies about a “stolen election”, the ineptitude of the Capitol police, the five people dead. 

 

May our anger serve our greater good to give us the strength and fortitude to rise up now and work together for the reckoning of racism in this country, the legacy of enslavement, the impoverishment of so many for so long due to the greed of a few.  But may we not be engulfed in hatred.  This journey will be long and hard.  There will be joy in the coming together again for social justice and peace but also hardship.  Hatred would drain us of vital energy and creativity needed for the rising. 

 

When the plague is over, let us come together again in our houses, our temples of worship, the great grand cathedrals of our national parks to strengthen our resolve for social justice.  Let us be blessed by all of our differences in our work for peace.  Alongside the fraying of the fabric of our society, the terrible plague, the economic hardships, the violence against people of color hope is already emerging.  In my work in economic justice and opportunity, people across the spectrum are having conversations and proposing change that I would not have thought possible a year ago.  When I was training as an economist 30 years ago, gender and racial poverty was blamed for “poor choices.”  Corporations, it was shown in the economic models, would not discriminate because it would be bad for profits.  We were advised not to participate in research that went against the grain of orthodoxy if we wanted positions in the halls of academia.  Now, the veins of structural racism and violence against people of color have been exposed and will not be so easily covered.  We see who is dying more from COVID, who have lost jobs, can’t feed children.   

 

May moral outrage insight our yearning for social justice and compassion guide our actions.