Anger management.

I posted a link to an article about racism on my Facebook page.

I’d found the article through Twitter and I liked the approach that the author took. And so, almost without out thinking, I did what I sometimes do and put the link onto Facebook and as a tweet. And then I went about my day.

I had lunch and a leisurely and long catch up with a friend of many, many years. We visited one of our favourite plant nurseries and shivered a bit as we admired the autumn splendour and trawled the pots for sale. On the way home I returned a swag of books to the library and phoned my niece who was hours away from a flight to China. She was in the shower so I arranged with her dad to call back when they’d be on the way to the airport.

When I got home I stoked up the fire and made a cuppa. While I waited to make the phone call I checked my Facebook page. There was a comment under the link I’d posted. Any smile that may have been on my face was quickly wiped off.

The commenter – the brother of a gentle and wise friend of mine, and in real life an acquaintance I meet up with at parties and funerals – was furious about the article. He had let fly with a tirade of monumental proportions. He included sentences that wondered if the author could “simply be trotting out the old lefty bullshit smugness along the lines of ‘there are so many bad people out there and just quietly , I’m pretty good .'”,  and ridiculed the author and, possibly, me,  with “Find another topic love . How about Australian Men Bash their wives”.

I felt as if this bloke had vomited bile all over my page.

I’ve seen him do it before. He and his brother are Facebook police,  sharks in the ocean moving silently around the news feed  checking for offence. When they pounce – suddenly and sharply, teeth gnashing and eyes blazing – it is not pretty. It’s not the fact that there’s disagreement that’s the problem. It’s the anger they bring to the argument, the red-hot fury they bestow upon anyone they think might be a dreaded lefty or a wicked feminist. Or, now, who has a different view of racism. It is not nice to watch and even less attractive when it’s aimed fair and square at you.

But meet them socially and they’re lovely fellows. Funny, thoughtful, courteous, respectful. I know they have different life politics than I, but I’ve never felt brow beaten and bullied by them.

I do on Facebook.

And it made me realise what a stumbling block anger on social media is for me. I come up against it – in all it’s ugliest colours – again and again and I’m always shocked. It takes my breath away and confuses my thoughts and words. Why do people need to be like this? I wonder, each and every time, as if it’s a new thing I’m witnessing, and not something repeated every day, every hour. Why does it have to come down to vilification and mockery? Why does someone have to be totally discredited as a human being because they have a different thought?

This morning I was reading a transcript of a talk that Australian author Helen Garner recently gave. Right at the end, she quotes the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner,  as if for my benefit, : “Everything that one thinks one understands has to be understood over and over again, in its different aspects, each time with the same new shock of discovery.”

If someone came into my house, under the guise of friendship, and began abusing and mocking and belittling my thoughts, and shouted and bullied me, I would ask that they leave. Immediately.

So here’s a new light shed upon my understanding.

It’s time for a Facebook friends clean up. Immediately.

I’m calling it anger management.