Friday, November 13, 2015

Trump Is Wrong On Carson's "Anger"

So Trump is on the campaign trail trying his best to take down Carson who has passed him in the polls. Rather than stick to the issue that put him out front from the beginning, he has decided to play psychologist and tell us how people with anger issues never get over it. Trump is wrong and I'm going to tell you why.

When I was a kid, I had a hair trigger, nasty temper. I understand this may have been inherited from my late grandfather on my mother's side. I can't say for sure, but I had it. I got into a lot of fights in elementary school and spent a lot of alone time trying avoid other "angry moments". If I could turn green and grow a few feet, I would have. At times I had to be physically restrained from beating the shit out of other students. I was fortunate to have been attending a school at a time where zero tolerance rules were not in effect and an administration that did not assume that because I was angry that I was stupid. I had, like many black boys, impulse control issues. In the 6th grade that came to a end when something in my brain "clicked" and I stopped with the hair trigger part of my temper and became "slow burning fuse" temper.

Slow burning fuse temper has it's own drawbacks. Instead of releasing the beast on the spot, one tends to internalize incidents until one explodes. In essence you keep a mental ledger of every incident a person does to you and then on the last incident, which may or may not be anything large, they hit the magic number of incidents and then it's on!

In my case, when a person on the block who I had a conflict with decided to throw his bike pump at me, he hit his "it's on" moment and I experienced, for the first time in my life, killing rage. Those who have experienced killing rage know the feeling. The best I can explain it is that you want your target dead and there is nothing else in consideration. So I went into my house and picked up a solid aluminum bar and proceeded to return to the scene and bludgeon this person to death.

So why am I not in jail or just getting out on a 25 to life bid? Because the day I would have become a murderer a man was painting the house and saw me rush by ranting on how I was going to kill someone and then he saw me re-emerge with the aluminum bar and he knew I saw serious and stopped me from making a huge mistake. Like Carson, an intervention of fate kept me from doing something very, very bad. Unlike Carson I didn't attribute this to divine intervention or took it as a reason to dedicate my life to God. What it did do is make me very aware of killing rage and that I never wanted to experience that again. You see, unlike what Trump thinks, those of us who have experience killing rage can and most often do get that under control. Does that mean that we cannot get there again? No! It does mean that because we know what it feels like when we are headed in that direction that we know to "get off the road" before we get to killing rage.

Some people get that control from religion. Some get it through athletic endeavors. Some do meditation. But one thing we all have in common is that we know to remove ourselves from situations and people before we get to the point where we want to kill. In fact I would say that those of us who met our inner killer are far better prepared than those who have not. Why? Because we are no longer in denial about the human capacity to kill. You won't catch us saying things like "I would never kill..." because we know that everybody has a breaking point. Everybody. We happened to have found ours and we don't want to revisit that.

So although I have my issues with Carson, the fact that he tried to gut a kid when he was a youth is not one of them. As for Trump, it's looks desperate, really to be going on and on about this particular issue. There are plenty of policy issues that Trump can take Carson to task for and he should spend his time on those.