Anger issues

Jul 15, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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As the leader of the TUC, I hope that Mr Lincoln Lewis does not use the same tactic negotiating with management as he uses in responding to my writings. Woe be unto the workers under his stewardship. Rather than addressing the issues raised, Mr Lewis continues to hone in to some word or other; create a straw man and then proceed to flail away at it in his inimitable pugnacious style.
Take his latest ‘response’ to my continued assertion that his calls for a more confrontational approach to his identified as African-Guyanese problems, are counterproductive. Noting en passant that a psychologist friend had mentioned in his writings Mr Lewis came across as a man with ‘anger issues’, I wrote: “Now I don’t have a problem with Mr Lewis being angry. Anger is a natural human emotion that arises out of frustrated or thwarted desires/goals. The problem is when we allow it to become excessive and allow it to subvert our reason. Mr Lewis after all is head of the TUC: his anger issues can have wide repercussions. All I’ve suggested is that Mr Lewis’ approach to addressing the African Guyanese condition in Guyana is perhaps self defeating”
Not content with ignoring the substantive contents of my column (that basically all groups in Guyana must work towards satisfying their common interests) Mr Lewis latched on to the word “anger” and went off on to flagellate the constructed straw man. He asserted, “anger is not necessarily bad and can be functional” and then spent almost a thousand words giving examples of what he defined as ‘constructive anger”.
Now I never said that anger cannot be used ‘constructively’: in fact, the psychologist that commented on Mr Lewis’ writing mission to Guyana was organising a workshop on ‘anger management’. This deals with not bottling up one’s anger, but utilizing it in a constructive manner.
I hope that Mr Lewis saw my interview with the gentleman (along with Swami Aksharananda) on TV. It might be of some help to him. What I’d written in my article was that “Anger is a natural human emotion that arises out of frustrated or thwarted desires/goals. The problem is when we allow it to become excessive and allow it to subvert our reason.” It was very obvious that Mr Lewis’ untreated anger issues caused his reason to be subverted once again as he went off on his rant.
But inevitably, in a Freudian slip, Mr Lewis confirmed my concerns about his exhortations for a more confrontational style of politics by the Opposition by segueing from his disquisition on ‘constructive anger” to one on ‘violence’. “Constructive anger”, I would remind Mr Lewis from his own examples such as Dr King’s civil rights struggle in the USA, does not have to use violence. Dr King, in following the Gandhian strategy of “satyagraha” transmuted the anger precipitated by unequal social conditions into a constructive program for change. This is all I am exhorting Mr Lewis to do.
As I wrote back in 2009, “This fixation on the culture of violence leads to what psychologists call a “grievance-hunting” mindset. It is a pathological condition that betrays a state of mind uniquely incapable of seizing the opportunities and responsibilities of the present and so must morbidly escape to the past to discover a sanctuary of grievance for itself.”
The fixation, I explained, is due primarily to ideologues locking on to a problem space from the past, and in refusing to rigorously interrogate the present they mechanistically apply the answers from that past to circumstances that might have changed radically.  Critiques being always strategic, those answers are not so much wrong as irrelevant.
The “expired strategies” invariably lead to frustration, anger (and violence) since even though hard work may be done to implement them, success is elusive. External malevolent forces and scapegoats are blamed for the failure and the grievance-hunting mentality sets in.”
We can see the scapegoats in every letter of Mr Lewis and his cohorts.
Lewis says that “If Dev were not interested in racial dominance he’d speak out against intra and inter group(s) atrocities.” Mr Lewis’ anger issues seem to have affected his memory as well as his reason. I remind him that against all advice, I went to the Square of the Revolution in 2004 in solidarity with every African group in Guyana to denounce the ‘intra and inter group(s) atrocities” then being committed. My eyes were opened, however, when every group there denounced only the violence against Africans ‘youths”. I had to point out that innocent Indians, including children, had also been murdered.
In the euphoria of the moment before I spoke, Mr Tacuma Ogunseye promised ‘protection’  as he introduced me. That protection seemed to have been withdrawn after I mentioned that Indians also had issues of justice.

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