Being liberal: Can I still be angry?

I think to be liberal you have get past an ‘anger barrier’. What I mean by this is that it is quite easy to get angry when you hear about ‘foreigners stealing our jobs’, ‘young immigrant gangs’, ‘lazy jobless on benefits’. And when people get angry they do stupid things and come up with stupid solutions to exaggerated problems. I think to be liberal you have to get past this initial knee jerk anger to allow yourself to think logically. And the people that do this, all of them, realise that these problem are: not real problems or they have been exaggerated or they are small, bad consequence of doing a lot of good. Once you actually look at the statistics and history of immigration in this country (UK) then you quickly realise that we need ‘foreigners’ to help the country develop and if it wasn’t for immigration we wouldn’t have the Britain we have today. Only a very angry person can deny such blatant evidence and fact.

The problem of young ethnic minorities in gangs and being involved in crime is a problem (although it is massively over exaggerated in my opinion). But angry right wing people try to blame the ethnic minorities rather than thinking logically and realising that many of these individuals are poor, uneducated and have been brought up in an environment where it is easy to turn to crime. Had the white middle class Daily Mail reader (or ‘twats’ as I like to call them) been brought up in the same environment they would most probably have ended up in the same gangs.

I too sometimes get angry at the thought of a lazy person sitting around doing nothing all day but still getting free money, which the taxes I pay (not any more though because I have just recently become a student again but I wrote this when I was working so fuck you) are paying for. But beyond that anger and completely surpassing it in volume is the happiness I feel that we live in a time in which people who are really struggling due to mental or physical problems can be helped by those individuals who do not have any problems at all. How fucking amazingly wonderful is it that we have job seekers allowance and various benefits? It is surely the sign of a logical, rational yet compassionate modern society. I would rather everyone who needs benefits get them and some individuals who don’t need them get them than no one at all geting them. But I think a lot of right wing individuals would rather no one got them.

In my opinion, which all of this really is, anger can be a good thing too. Because without anger we would not try to change things we don’t like. But anger based on truth is the key. Many liberals are angry, myself definitely included, are angry but they are angry that people are angry about issues they don’t know the facts about or they can’t even back up their angry opinions with evidence.  It is really quite annoying because I think I would be a much calmer person if other people didn’t get angry, the bastards rile me up! But at the same time I like that they make me angry otherwise I wouldn’t argue with them or try to tell other people why I think it is bad to be right wing and why it is bad that people are trying to change things based on nothing but their own personal belief.

However, there needs to be a good level of angry, a balance of anger. Some liberals are so angry that they too start acting based on personal belief. These people will belief information if it supports their already established opinion without even checking if the info is based on evidence. We have all met these people; they are generally the ‘anti-science liberals’ or ‘bell ends’ as I like to call them. They have gone beyond listening to evidence to listening to themselves and like minded people. They believe that everything should be ‘natural’ without knowing what natural means (who even does know to be honest?). They are just as irritating as very right wing people but they at least are not a dangerous. Generally the worst an extreme liberal will do is tut at you or demand that trees have the same rights as humans. There are also the really strange ‘right wing liberals’ or ‘bell ends’ as I like to call them. These are the extreme liberals that would hurt you, the ones who would dig up your relatives. This is because they are extremely liberal in one or a few political issues but are quite right wing in how they deal with it. These are the liberals who are fuelled by anger (and a bit of tofu) and ignore reason.

So how do you get the perfect balance of anger? Nobody knows surely but I think we should always try our best to calm down, have a cup of tea and a scone and just think, read and learn about things and then come up with the most informed opinion we can given the relatively short and meaningless amount of time we have. Also, we should get all the really right wing people together and either kill them or use them as slaves. No. That’s the angry irrational me which, I am trying to fight every day. So maybe a better suggestion is that we should ridicule them for the angry idiots they are. To be honest it’s not that hard.