Two Minutes Revulsion

Browsing the web today I came across this story Bush voices support for abortion rights opponents:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush marked the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision Monday, telling thousands of abortion foes he shares their goal of seeing "the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected into law."

Nothing special, just another day. Just another example of his manipulation and hypocracy. As he always does, he didn't show up for the event, but phoned it in, so he could avoid being photographed there. I felt, as I usual, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, when I looked at Bush's smirking visage during yet another encounter with the on-going experience of being exposed to this man and his stupendously negative and horifying effect on this country and the world.

It occured to me, as it frequently does, that the anger that I feel, about him and his associates, that whatever apparently impotent actions I may take against them is natural and instinctive but in the long run not very healthy. But what can one do?

Then I recalled and looked up some passages in Orwell's 1984 about the Two Minutes Hate:

The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

…

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Now, the metaphor is not perfect, but the experience I and many others have gone through over the past six years is like the conditioning that those poor souls in 1984, fictional though they may be, had to endure.

And so, it occured to me that what might be healthy would be for me and others in my boat to institue a practice that we could call the "Two Minutes Revulsion" and take a brief time out to project our anger towards Bush & Co., get it out of our system and then move on for the rest of the day.

Worth a try anyway …