Musings
of a Modern Warrior
“Never
respond to an angry person with a fiery comeback, even if he deserves it…Don’t
allow his anger to become your anger.”
Bodhi
Sanders (Warrior Wisdom: Ageless Wisdom for a Modern Warrior)
One day
last week, I was heading out to Hoover for a Physical Therapy appointment. I
entered the Red Mt. Expressway at University Blvd and merged onto the highway
as rapidly as the heavy traffic allowed. Since I was continuing south on Highway 31, I
got all the way into the left lane—the other two lanes would be exiting onto 280
east. At the speed of the traffic, I was cruising along, when a man in a black Camry
blazed up behind me, a foot or two from my taillights. Since I couldn’t move to
the right because of another car, I held steady with the speed of the traffic. With
a jerky motion, he switched lanes, moved right up beside me, lowered his
window, stuck his arm all the way out and gave me a middle finger along with a
face red with rage.
This
incident is all too familiar, and it’s unsettling. I’m certain that you have
had an equivalent experience. It is mystifying to me, honestly, why anyone
would get that mad over a traffic slow down—but so many of us now are living
with an unprecedented level of anger that such things happen every day. What do
you imagine would have occurred if I had responded in kind to this man? Just a
few yards later the traffic light was red, so both of us had to stop. Would he
have jumped from his car and punched me, or shot me? Who knows? I just hope he
didn’t go home and beat his wife because he was so angry with a total stranger.
It feels
to me like we all just need to take a deep breath and ask ourselves where this
free-floating rage is coming from. Yes, we’ve been caught up in a pandemic, and
an angry political climate, but so has every generation before us. I have been
reading John Archibald’s book, Shaking the Gates of Hell, about the Civil
Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. It was a time, at least in Alabama, of
tremendous upheaval. There were daily protests, and marches, and between the
passing of Brown vs. The Board of Education (1954) and Dr. King’s incarceration in the
Birmingham Jail (1963), 40 bombs exploded in the Birmingham area. Most were set off by
members of the Ku Klux Klan in attempts to intimidate black people to stop their protests. Just as happened in Berlin in the 1930’s, most white people
outside the city had no clue what was going on downtown. Berliners were going about
their lives as though those were normal times, while Hitler was quietly
rounding up Jews and loading them onto trains. Those were not normal times, and
these aren’t either.
We need
to find a way to express our frustration without resorting to aggression and violence. This especially
applies to people in leadership positions, who are saying and doing things that
exacerbate the situation. Jack Weatherford, in Genghis Kahn and the Making
of the Modern Warrior, wrote, “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t
lead.” Even Genghis Kahn knew that the first key to leadership is
self-control, and particularly the mastery of pride. The Book of Proverbs in
the Old Testament says it this way, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit
before a fall.” (King James Version) Wonder if the guy in that black Camry reads his
Bible.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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