EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY: Unplug the outrage machine

Why are people so angry all the time? And how can we help calm things down?

My questions are prompted by two completely unrelated incidents, one in western Massachusetts and one in the western part of the country.

First, let’s turn to “Ladies-Gate” in Easthampton. There, outrage has been directed at the chair of the school committee for overreacting to an email where she and the board’s executive assistant were addressed as “ladies” by a prospective job candidate.

That’s how I see it. She overreacted. It was silly. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being addressed as “ladies.”

Also, as with most things, there’s likely much more going on behind the clickbait headlines.

For instance, after reading a little more, I learned that the job candidate in question served as the principal of the town’s high school for several years. Might that account for the close 4-3 vote to make the superintendent job offer and the overreaction to “ladies”? Surely, the chair and committee had a strong opinion about a former important school leader.

I’m not agreeing — call me “lady” any day of the week. But instead of assuming some missing context, shrugging off the incident as overblown or — even better — laughing at the state of affairs where being called a “lady” is an insult, people blew their stacks and even made threats.

The second incident was a recent speech by a federal appeals court judge at Stanford Law School in California. The judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, had been invited by the campus’s Federalist Society chapter, a conservative group, to address the students. That didn’t sit well with some.

Instead of peacefully protesting, though, the students who didn’t like the judge’s past rulings and private attorney representation reacted with such wrath that the judge couldn’t give his speech. He had to endure slurs and attacks, including one protester suggesting his daughter deserved to be raped.

The judge asked for an administrator to step in, and that unlucky administrator happened to be the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach. Rather than calm the situation down, she seemed to agree with the protesters, asking whether the “lemon was worth the squeeze.” In other words, was Duncan’s speech worth the division caused at the school?

In the aftermath, the dean of the law school and Stanford’s president apologized to Duncan, and the associate dean was placed on leave. In sum, the incident followed the typical outrage/apology/blame trajectory.

Then this. In a Sunday New York Times front-page report, the head of the Federalist Society chapter, Tim Rosenberger, who was presumably offered a fastball down the middle to stoke further outrage, did the opposite. He offered support to the suspended associate dean.

The two had worked together in the past, he noted, including bringing conservative speakers to campus. Her support of other controversial speakers took “courage,” he said. And he found her willing to partner with the Federalist Society in ways others at the school would not.

Rosenberger said, “People have called her stupid and incompetent. She’s a smart and good person who was just put in a really bad spot.”

Wow. In normal times, his words would be simply kind, but given the temperature, they are extraordinary.

What did he have that others apparently didn’t or chose not to consider? Context. He knew there was more to the story than was reported.

Obviously, we can’t know everything about a situation we read about or see on TV, but perhaps one step to calming down the resort to outrage is to assume there’s a broader context — or even better, dive deeper and look for it.

To my first question, why are people so angry all the time?  Certainly, traditional and social media play a role in pressing our buttons. Financial anxiety and post-COVID adjustment also lead to short fuses. Bottom line, a lot of us are pretty stressed out, and anger is a natural reaction.

As Town Meeting and other opportunities to jump down each other’s throats come our way, though, may I suggest we try to channel Mr. Rosenberger: Assume broader context, be a voice of reason, and when given the opportunity to amp up the volume of the outrage machine, unplug it instead.

Virginia Buckingham is the president of the Current’s board of directors. Her column appears weekly.