BY CORWIN P. KING
When my grandson was very young, it was easy to tell when he was mad. He’d fold his arms, scowl, and say, “I’m mad!” Once he got mad at me and shouted, “You’re not my grandpa anymore!” He changed his mind later when we shared a popsicle.
It’s harder to tell when adults are mad, though the emotion may be no less intense. Adults are good at masking their anger. Showing it seems to be a sign of weakness, an admission that someone or something “got to” us. “Never let ‘em see you sweat,” ran a line from a deodorant commercial some years ago, and most of us take that to heart both physically and psychologically.
Of course, many things can make us mad, but one of the most fundamental is injustice. Whether it’s the cop who gives us a ticket when everyone else is driving just as fast, or the person who owes us money and doesn’t pay it back, it’s the feeling that we—or someone we care about—haven’t been treated fairly. It rankles us because it violates the Golden Rule—“do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Sadly, injustice is a part of life. The world isn’t fair, people don’t always behave honorably, and, yes, bad things happen to good people.
But while we can often accept injustice from nature or strangers on the street, it’s a challenge to accept it from relatives. Why? Because we think we know these people and we trust them. When they let us down, it’s a double fault—they were unreliable, but we were gullible.
So it is that the most painful feelings of injustice often occur between family members. Family fights over real or imagined slights and insults are notorious for their viciousness, and longevity. Animosities can grow and resentments can simmer, sometimes for years, until they erupt in acts that may be all out of proportion to the original offense. It’s hard to bear an injustice without wanting to get even. Families have been destroyed by those who prefer revenge to reconciliation.
The antidote to this is ironically to do more of what probably caused the problem in the first place—talk. Injustices need to be discussed. Anger over them needs to be surfaced and not bottled up. Otherwise, it turns to hostility, a far more corrosive emotion. On the other side, we should treat our relatives the way we treat our friends. We don’t belittle or bully our friends because we know they wouldn’t take it. They’d be hurt or offended. They’d probably tell us off and then cut us off. Why should we expect any less from our family?
And when we talk, we should talk to the ones who caused the injustice, not those in the middle of it. It’s easy to complain to people we know will hear us like close friends, even if they can’t do anything but feel bad.
But unless they’re trained counselors or mediators, getting more people involved in an argument rarely helps. On the contrary, other voices and opinions may compound the injustice. The last thing you need when trying to resolve a wrong is people taking sides.
Finally, we might remember that a lot of hard feelings can be resolved with two simple words sincerely spoken: “I’m sorry.” They’re not the same as a popsicle, but they have the same effect.
Corwin P. King is a retired university professor now serving as an adjunct faculty member at Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences in Yakima. His articles on health and other topics have appeared in The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Mensa Bulletin. He lives in Ellensburg, Wash.