Anger Is Hydra

‘Anger Statue’ by Elmada

The Many-Head Monster

08 January – The pastoral text of Fr Reuter is this: I grieve for the victims of armed conflicts, terrorism and violence, and for the silent deaths caused by hunger, abortion and euthanasia. – Benedict XVI. First of all, I take violence as the use of force and not persuasion or argument as an instrument of change. I’m interested in violence to rights, meaning social rights, not individual rights. Social rights are not a summation of individual rights; they are a systematization of these rights, so that these rights do not become mere multiples but one whole system. The rights of an individual give rise and, having done so, are limited, by the rights of society. Now then, Elmada has this note below the photograph: ‘I have no idea what it is supposed to be.’ I believe I have, and it is that anger is a many-headed monster, like Hydra, the monster slain by Hercules. Anger has many heads: discrimination, revenge, armed conflict, terrorism, violence. ‘Now then,’ if you are not aware of your own anger, then ‘you have no idea what it is supposed to be.’ In that sense, you are one of its victims, in fact, the very first.