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It’s an emotion many find themselves to be familiar with in one shape or another. The blinding rage of anger, the emotional conflagration of frustration, annoyance, and spite rolled into one and released as a mixture of spittle and curse. There is no being who is unable to experience it, or to say that they’ve never unleashed it. We are human. Our nature demands that anger to exist in order to survive.

It was anger that drove the fury behind the Crusades of old, the holy pursuit of religious conquest and domination over what one side called infidels and the other blasphemers. Anger was aplenty in those times. If you carried a sword and bore a religious marking upon your shield, you were considered a man of respect and devotion to his deity, even if you were a man of drink and of abusive tastes towards the fairer sex. What did it matter? Your fury was directed against those who blaspheme your lord. Why tell you to stop?

Fast forward to the modern day. Anger is now well-known, and even celebrated. Martial artists, wrestlers, or even the back-country, hick-town brawlers are given their five minutes of fame in their fury against one another. They often find courage for their rage to emerge in drink or in words of challenge, but nonetheless it’s made known with a swung fist and blood dripping to the grass. In the city, we have gangs who filter their rage to unjust events in the past, harm done for causes beyond their control, and responding with actions that lack comprehension of thought. But they exist. They exist and are even glorified, these users and breeders of anger.

But you still do not know the worst rage yet. It lies deeper than those, deeper than the Nordic conquerors from the sea, deeper than the berserkers of old. It is an anger that few know, but the few who are aware fear with an unknown depth. The anger that lies behind the smile. I speak not of the smile of the Jester, nor of the smile of a man broken in his mental ward, rocking and cradling his straightjacket bound body as the voices usher him on. I speak of the smiling face of the neighbor down the road. John Smith or his wife Mary Sue.

You must question to yourself, what could they possibly be angry about? What rage could they contain to be afraid of? They have a happy life. They have a home. A relationship. Income, and work, and even a sunny disposition to face every day. You’d like to think that was what made it so simple. You might even feel jealous of their joy, thinking that it should be you who is that happy, rather than stewing in the hole of your making.

What you don’t see, even if you looked with the sharpest of eyes through the most powerful of looking glasses, is that brimming pool laying still at the base of their soul, kept buried beneath promises and layers of patience and wisdom and kindness. Those layers are interlaced with locks of hope, with bolts of optimism. It makes for a grand system of binding, to keep that rage at bay. “Nothing should penetrate these defenses,” the crafters say. “This will surely hold.”

Except when the time comes, over the longest course of time, when time itself is aged and rusted and sleepy, wanting to shut its eyes for just the slightest of moments to feel that bliss of unconscious sleep that the bolts feel something slip. The tiniest drip, the smallest blip, a word or thought that penetrates down, down, deeper and down, sliding past every layer of protection the engineers claimed would never fail. It flings itself past the final layer of patience, its creaking metal giving way with a sudden snap as the invader flings itself towards that dormant pool. It slams into the waiting depths not with a fluster, not with a bang, but just a drip. The smallest, slightest drip.

But from that drip, the beast stirs. The slumber spell is broken, the seal faltering as it comes to life. The restraints buckle, and then break as it rears its head. It rages. It demands retribution for the wrongs done to it, both old and new. Lash out! Strike! Claw and Tear and Rip and Shred! There will be no more waiting. There will only be Retribution!

When John Smith and Mary Sue feel that beast stir, they themselves try to restrain it. They must adhere to the standards of society. It wouldn’t do to lash out at their friends, their neighbors. And even if they wished to, would it be respected, their anger? I question if anyone ever would, to see the figure of peace become distorted into the face of rage. After all, John helped Billy when he got angry at his baseball game when he lost the clutch moment. Mary helped Jessica feel better when she was taunted and pursued by the hecklers and haunts of her school. They knew, they had experience, to not let anger be the guide, but patience, wisdom.

But they can’t escape it when that beast rears its head in their forms. It overtakes them, and it cannot be avoided, for no human can escape their nature. It is who they are. We are what our natures would make us to be. Yet the most infuriating aspect, the burning white flame in the center of that red, smoking, fiery mass, is when that anger isn’t acknowledged for what it is. And why isn’t it acknowledged?
“You’re not allowed to be angry.”

Such a maddening phrase! You would deny the same right you yourself express so often, deny it to they who use it so little? You, the one who plants their feet on the raised hill of moral supremacy and claims to know best, when they who you speak down to was your very savior not long ago? You whine and prattle and spill your inner demons onto the floor for them to hear, yet when the tables turn, you deny them their right of expression. Curse you! May the world crumble beneath you for your words, your feet giving way to nothingness as your hypocrisy snatches you round the waist and tugs you into the darkness you think you can claim to be master of.

I know the anger of the quiet man. The still waters that lay within him that, with one ripple of effort, becomes a surging tide of destruction and hate. It is the worst to see it emerge from they whom you’d call peacekeeper, the guardians, the vigils of sanity and hope. For when they feel anger, and it comes to the surface, they must do all within their might to not lash it upon the innocent, the defenseless. Not even upon those who would most deserve their wrath; the instigators, the challengers, the naysayers and jeering crowds. It would be a mercy to them, to be spared such wrath. For there is no greater wrath, even beyond that of the woman scorned, than the wrath of the smiling man.