“My dear madam!” huffed the gentleman. “This is an outrage!”
Another type of tantrum is to pick up the first hefty thing in sight and throw it against a wall, breaking the thing and damaging the wall.
“There is that deadly sin of anger!” observers will disapprove, quietly so the angry person won’t hear.
God’s purposes are never served by anger, we say. “Anger management” has become a common theme, as anger has always been a common phenomenon.
People often try to explain a tantrum away by explaining why they were so upset. It was just how they expressed it that was regrettable, but they were right to be angry, they suggest.
You can count to ten before you say something, or do something, but when you’re really mad, there’s no counting to ten because if you wait that long to react, people won’t appreciate how angry you are.
Never go to bed angry with your spouse, people say, but what’s the point of having a discussion in which you’re not going to prevail? Better to keep quiet and allow the anger to fade, because it isn’t always something that can be talked away.
Some people are just born angry. Someone can be having a decent day, but someone accidentally gets in his way at the grocery store, and, angrily, he says, “Excuse me!” and, as thoughts of revenge race through his mind, he looks fiercely back at the other person, who is baffled and scared, and simply wants to get away from this psycho who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, capable of who knows what.
Anger can be a bad thing that will ruin your day for no good reason. When that happens, obviously there’s a problem, and the person needs to learn to not think so much of himself and not take things so seriously.
But if someone steals your lunch out of the work refrigerator, of course you’ll be angry, because that’s not right, and the thief shouldn’t have done that, although it’s not likely to stop because the thief probably won’t be caught, and it’s probably not the case that the thief is a poor person temporarily in such straits that he needs to steal lunch, and when the thief’s situation improves, he’ll make up for it tenfold? Yeah… no. There are people who just like to steal lunches, and if you work with such a person, of course you get angry when your lunch is stolen.
The natural response to injustice is anger.
Jesus called James and John “sons of thunder.” I imagine they made a habit of expressing themselves forcefully. Paul routinely called his followers “fools” and addressed them in blistering terms.
Jesus too had angry words for his listeners.
God is repeatedly described as a God of anger and wrath.
A bird has to fly. A cloud has to rain. The Sun has to shine. The tide has to rise. A pot of water on a fire has to boil, and the way things are sometimes, for better or worse, try as hard as we can to avoid it, sometimes, a guy has to get angry.