Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“This is a world that demonizes those who transgress the system but has great sympathy for the system itself.”

“We cannot trust a society that makes judgments on the morality of a person without taking responsibility for how its own morality has instigated the conditions that call for such desperate decision-making.”

“You could go out and make more money in an afternoon than your parents made in a month...No really, think about that. If you see your mom working eight hours during the day and another job at night, and still coming home and saying we gotta have peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, but you, a kid, know you can go out and bring home steaks. What are you going to do? Really think about that. What are you going to do?”

”Holy anger is that which liberates. It marches, chants, and flips tables, demanding wrong be called by its rightful name. It is both passion and calculation, longing for more but for the sake of justice and dignity.”

“Anger that dominates relies on fear tactics and abuse to live. It makes no demand of the world except that it bow. This is often because it fears being ruled or overpowered itself. This is no excuse.”

“White rage, like all rage born not in defense of dignity but in defense of oppressive power, is manipulative. It is one of many examples of the difference between anger that dominates and anger that liberates.”

“It should not come as a surprise that nations built on Black suffering do not now recognize Black emotion with any particularity. Black anger has been forced into hiding by whip and chain and hose for so long that when whiteness encounters Black emotionality now, it still feels thoroughly alien.”

“If we do not starve our anger of attention, of affection, of intimacy, we will seldom find it desperately clamoring to take up space where it wasn’t meant to. An anger that is confident in its own belonging doesn’t need to compete to be held. Its hope becomes not for its own survival, but for the life of the soul that bears it.”

“And humanity can find no way out: we have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help us bring things back under human control. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habit... just as it removes us from the experience of Being... ”

“ the crisis of contemporary technological society as a whole, the crisis that Heidegger describes as the ineptitude of humanity [faced] with the planetary power of technology. Technology — that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics — is out of humanity's control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction.”

“The answer to moments of deformed anger is not to release the practice altogether, but to unalienate it and reintegrate it into an emotionally diverse life.”

“And hatred, which can still be a holy thing if directed toward evils and not creation, is also very fragile. It is difficult to contain it to where it’s meant to be.”

“Anger is never holier than when it acts in defense of the dignity of a person or piece of creation. But it requires we be more measured and protective of our words—not so that we censor ourselves on behalf of the fragile and defensive, but so that we will be heard by those we wish to be heard by.”

“To be permitted an anger that is imperfect, that tells the truth about the revenge and terror I crave for those who do harm, allows me to see things in myself that might otherwise go unnoticed. So often our wounds are invisible to or neglected by the world... our anger must be hidden in order to belong or survive. It is very important that our belonging before God not depend upon our ability to hide...truths in us”

“Anger expressed in the interior life is permitted to exist in its rawest and most honest form. It is not kept private out of shame or because it is inferior in status to public anger. Rather, its privacy grants us the freedom to understand our rage without pressure or compulsion to dilute it. It gives us the space to be laid bare and have our anger, like any emotion, refined in the presence of the divine.”

“Apathy is a giving up, a surrendering to what is. And it’s inherently a disconnecting force. It moves you away from a person. Rage comes for you. It is inherently relational. It might come with fire, but it’s still moving toward something, and in proximity, there is hope for reconnection. In this way, anger itself is a function of reconciliation. It is a bringing together.”

“Her belief in the existence of God was durable, which did not reduce her anger but enlarged it. She left that Seventh-day Adventist school and the church, and tried to leave God himself, but found herself tethered to him by rage. A mercy she did not readily comprehend. But in the end, it is much easier to locate love in rage than in apathy.”

“Baldwin said, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." I’m not convinced we can tell the truth alienated from... our emotions... Sometimes, however threatening it may be, it is seeing the face of anger that can finally shake a people out of their numbness...”

“The political and structural systems that life discovers for itself will clearly always be — for some time to come, at least—limited, halfway, unsatisfying, and polluted by debilitating tactics. It cannot be otherwise, and we must expect this and not be demoralized by it.”

“...the indirect pressure felt from living within the truth: the pressure created by free thought, alternative values and alternative behavior, and by independent social self-realization. The power structure, whether it wants to or not, must always react to this pressure to a certain extent.”

" the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening ones responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it."

“Audre Lorde said, "I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings…. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge." The anger of Black people is the undeserved gift of knowledge. I have no interest in protecting the ignorance of the violent.”

“For so long, Black people, noosed and muzzled, have not been permitted the liberty to tell the truth about the evil we’ve endured. And now, the language of niceness—and more recently, civility—serves to muzzle us further. There is an evil absurdity in this. I can name very few instances (none, arguably) of a niceness in God, and yet this is the demand the oppressor will always make of us.”

“It should be no secret that Black anger has been demonized by a white-dominated society—white Christianity playing no small part in the subjugation. We are told that the pinnacle of piety is niceness, and we are shamed out of conflict, protest, advocacy. We can cry but not too loud, our agony never allowed to disrupt the illusion of unity.”

“There’s a story of Jesus coming across a bare fig tree and cursing it... made sense when I learned that fig tree was the private preface to the very public force of anger in the temple. A place to encounter the divine had become a place of scarcity, emptied of the most vulnerable. And in the face of injustice and exclusion, we meet a God of holy, premeditated, bodily, unapologetic rage.”

“What rage must it take to pulverize a child? In demonic fury, to try to crush the image of God in a person? If you can look at what they did to him and feel nothing, you are not numb, you are dead. And what inner death does it take to allow your own guilt to torment someone else’s grief? Far too many people are incapable of bearing witness to someone else’s emotions without centering their own.”

“We are born knowing how to cry, but it takes another to teach us how to cry well and with purpose. As we watch our elders cry, we are learning. Sister June taught me how to grieve with my body. She taught me how to feel the tears on my face and not wipe them away. Her rhythm of lament has settled into my soul. At Wisewood, we’re collecting stones now to make a prayer labyrinth in the field next to the house.”

“Lament is intergenerational.”

“Sometimes I think that if some Christians stopped talking about escaping a someday hell and started bearing witness to the hellish conditions of life and the world at present, they’d see a lot more people in their churches come Sunday. When I watch somebody name what should not be and earnestly question God about it, I immediately become a fraction of the skeptic I am. Lament is a very compelling apologetic.”

“At some point, you must ask yourself, are you so committed to the delusion of positivity that you will stand by unmoved as those who bear the image of God cry out in pain?”