The Valor of Anger in the Face of Grief

April 2025

I. Grief

How is it that anger is an inherent part of grief?

Anger as an emotion is, definitionally, a feeling toward. In the case of grief– toward death, toward loss, toward injustice.

And common knowledge tells you to ‘work’ through anger, to trudge through its futility, acknowledging every corner of it in your learned psychobabble until it no longer exists. What they don’t tell you is that anger is the hidden gem of utility beneath all the pain and heartache, that it is the handle side of the burning knife in our chests.

Now, I have grasped the knife by its handle and wrenched it out, ready to use. In this moment of grief– of death, loss, and injustice– I am angry.

My anger is one that rejects and repels, one that burns defensively, scalding at the touch. My anger is one of words and actions, one with legs that kick and fists that hit. It is an anger of exclusion. Of oppression. Of confusion. I cannot comprehend death as a necessity; I cannot accept an unjust world that drives its inhabitants to death; And I cannot look away.

So I refuse to resume the yoke of neglect and profession as my comrades are being slaughtered and kidnapped and brutalized. I will not look a fool as Niemöller did (of First They Came), who averted his eyes a thousand times before his turn; then, when his name was called, had the ignorant nerve to finally reflect on his apathy. We must learn from his lesson sooner and reject wrong everywhere it exists, not just where it touches us.

So I rebuke and do battle.

I reject the state’s steely fist, in all its forms, which, veiled in a thin velvet glove, grabs aimlessly at the throats of its people, my people. I reject this internet which peddles in irony and irrelevance. I reject your science which accepts death as an inevitability. I reject the desolate defeatism of neoliberalism and technological determinism. And I reject your faith in the above– socially, economically, or spiritually– there is no one but us, no power but our own. All Power to the People– full stop.

Instead, I choose community. I choose wholeness. I choose love. Repelling fear with passion, I live a life hurled toward Bataillian death– erotic and total. No state will martyr me before my time. And no society will lull me into spiritual death.

All these I repel and reject are true violences. Base and mean violences that hide their fangs in the soft flesh of the state and its subsequent society— macroscopic, material violences which become naturalized through the superstructure of culture, law, and trade.

So, in the face of such violences, Anger can only look to me, like a prelude to Justice.

So how do we reorient our anger toward these gloved violences?

II. ANGER: IDENTIFYING THE ENEMY

“Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies...Anger is loaded with information and energy.” (Lorde, 1981)

Here in California, laws state that you can use force in self-defense if you reasonably believe yourself to be in imminent danger of harm. You can even use deadly force if you believe it necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm. But what level of self-defense is reasonable when the imminent danger, harm, and death comes at the hands of the law itself?

On February 7th, 2025, Linda Becerra Moran, a victim of sex trafficking, called 9-1-1 in a moment of terror. Upon arrival, Foothill police treated her as a suspect and purposefully antagonized the Spanish-monolingual trans woman in English until, in desperation, she held a knife to her own throat. They opened fire. Then, even as she lay unconscious in the hospital, they stationed officers around her bed, as if she was the criminal, until eventually the hospital’s ‘ethics’ board made the decision to pull the plug.

Or similarly, there is the case of Brandon Boyd. On November 19th, 2024, his family called the police in response to his mental health crisis. And though he had a gun with him, presumably to commit suicide, it wasn’t until the officers-on-site threw a flashbang at him that he picked it up, resulting in his immediate death.

We could also go on to list the countless black victims of police violence– Messiah Nantwi and Robert Brooks, who were beaten repeatedly to death while compliantly handcuffed at the Marcy Correctional Facility, Cameron Ford who was fatally shot after a SWAT team broke into his home on a no-knock warrant, or Sonya Massey who was shot in the face for holding a bowl of water after she called the police for assistance.

And these are only a select few of many such incidents. The police are not here to protect you. For all your tax dollars in their pockets, they owe you nothing. In fact, as many know, policing’s roots can be traced back to slave patrol, and prison labour to Jim Crow chain gangs. They both have been reformed and rebranded over and over until unidentifiable as their former selves.

But we must remember and regret: Both police and prisons are simply temporal extensions of systems of oppression past.

They exist to monopolize and exert violence in preservation of existing powers against those made to be without such power– the unhoused, communities of color, the people. And the state enacts this violence by codifying it into law right under your nose, thereby sanctioning law enforcement’s continuous brutalization and exploitation of its people.

The state is the enemy of the people. And when facing the state’s constant and imminent barbarity, violent resistance becomes self-defense– protest in the aftermath of tragedy is not enough. Reactionary complaint is not enough. We must dismantle the systems which allow and enact the deaths and disappearances of our friends and family.

III. IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Now that the capitalist imperialist creature has ravaged all that surrounds it into a barren wasteland, it turns its still-hungry maw upon itself. Like Ouroboros, the self-devouring snake, it begins with its most distal parts, the ostensible tail of America– the immigrant, the poor, the incarcerated (often one and the same). Let this metaphor not erase the centuries of exploitation and oppression which has already occurred and continues to occur within our borders, but instead, prepare us for a new stage of warfare.

We fight the battle from within.

IV. KILL THE COP (IN YOUR HEAD)

Lastly, even as you engage with this text, we must always be asking– What do you know? And how do you know it?

Doubt and scrutiny become acts of good faith in this era of supersaturation and indoctrination, as the cop outside your head erects physical walls to keep you wrapped up in creature comforts, while the cop inside your head erects schemas of thought to keep you tied to the familiar.

And familiarity is the death of intrigue.

Those which you hold most intimately are the most difficult to truly question. In fact, the beliefs that we hold most closely simply cease to appear as beliefs. They become the truths of our reality, and we begin to say “the sky is blue” instead of “I believe the sky is blue.”

Such held truths are more often shunted upon us by existing pedagogies rather than discovered and developed for ourselves. So, the good comrade must watch with a suspicious eye and speak with a vigilant tongue. We must question to comprehend– Question to know. Question to love. Question to liberate.

It is only through engaging with existing ontologies and psychological schemas (especially our own) in utterly bad faith that we can trample the gutter guards laid out by authoritarian pedagogies. These gutter guards are constructed of glorified, naturalized lies. When the reality of the state is incompatible with its people, it must create disparate realities and sideways ways of seeing and tell you– this is the right side up.

How is it that we can accept these false narratives as reality? How is it that a nation of people can function complacently in this put-upon delusion?

Well, for one, since birth, we are drilled in the practice of subservience. Under the guise of social lubricity, we are injected with passivity. We are taught to follow an arbitrary set of rules called manners, address our “higher-ups” as Mr. or Ms., or more egregiously– Sir or Ma’am (which, itself, as a binary, restricts our way of thought further). Then, in compulsory education, we are then taught rigid, state-sanctioned ways of learning, to receive permission before speaking, to stifle “extraneous” thought and behavior, and, like a dog, to move at the sound of the bell– not before, not after. All this, primes us for willing participation in the authoritarian illusion.

These modes of obedience become the norm.

They become the familiar matrix through which we conduct our lives– the very stuff of which our illusional society is constructed upon, an illusion expanded upon by the immobilizing drollery of our media.

In the original sense of the word, Media— a means of communication— grows increasingly trite and self-referential, aiming to trap its participants in its cyclic stasis. As we engage in the meta, we disconnect from the immediate reality of oppression, choosing to delude ourselves in the hollow respite of the increasingly digital alternative.

So, we sloth through this gel, growing ever slower and apathetic, all the while policing, ourselves and each other, on adherence and conformity.

And it’s so easy to just stop moving. To subject yourself to the safe and pleasant stasis of civil delusion. To restrict your thought to familiar paths. To lay obediently, in fetal position, within the lines marked out for you, swaddled by illusions of security, familiarity, and convenience.

Don’t stop.

Liberate your mind. Break free of placation and complacency. Excavate your curiosity and activity from the sticky-sweet schema of the state. Learn. Argue. Act. Each bald-faced question, each careful reexamination chips at the steely comfort of swaddled thought.

So undull your mind. Get angry.

Act pointedly and speak sharply. Let the edge, friction, and heat of your inquisition cut through the numbing plastic of state-induced hallucination. Break from obedience. Veto taboo. Read banned literature. Engage in truth. Get creative. Let your anger drive a stake through the false solace of self-awareness. Let it break you from the confines of capitalist authoritarian realism, to imagine a different way of being– a better way of being.

Let it move you to connect, to fight, to learn. Learn to level the blade of curiosity against the suffocating bounds placed upon your psyche and, more importantly, those who placed them there.

Kill the cop in your head.

Then kill him again, outside.