They never get angry

A documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer  

This week I was introduced through an Aljazeera interview to Joshua Oppenheimer, a maker of documentary films.  I heard him and I was utterly drawn to him, finding him both daring and insightful.  He was speaking out of his investing ten years of his life documenting Indonesia's 1965 military killings of some one million so called communists.  This had become for him a life focus for he saw here a story that needed to be told.  He saw a story of one of the great unknown crimes against humanity in modern history.  He saw a story that remains current 50 years later in Indonesia for no one has ever been held accountable for what was done so that today you have perpetrators living within the community beside families of victims.  He saw a story that speaks to a world wherein humanity can be so ruthless.  Yet it comes from an Asian country where everyone is gentle and dignified and never ruthless.

Is that so?

This week I have had to deal with a situation in the workplace where an adult Thai expressed to me his great and deep anger.  They never get angry?  That is not so and it is unfair to think that they don't.  They are human after all.  If anger is not expressed or resolved it stays with you and runs the danger of being expressed in ruthless ways.

And yes, his anger arose out of his feeling having been under a ruthless attack at the hands of another staff member, his junior.  As he described what happened, one could think that it was only small matters but for him not so.  They were huge matters for him of being affronted and shown no respect within his Thai culture.  For him, the ruthlessness of another, as he experienced it, caused him great hurt and anger.

Still I do not know the whole story or what may really be going on.  In the midst of outward beauty and gracefulness, there lie anger and hurt accompanied by a ruthlessness that we are all capable of and that I can see here being acted out by one against another in our workplace even if they do not realize it or are doing it ever so subtly. The human beast can be cruel, even if ever sublimely so. 

In a culture, where conflict is avoided and people are not allowed to get angry, what happens?  Anger does not go away.  People do not stop being human.  The dignified, graceful face may remain intact but underneath there is a raging volcano wanting to explode into ruthless behavior.

I see the connection here between my two events of the week.  Bad behavior does occur and people are ruthless to each other, no matter what the face may present.  All is never what it seems.  I keep hitting that line in my being here.