OK...so I haven't updated my blog in a while because I couldn't figure out how to log in (only I had to do something like that, but I figured it out and now I am back.
Well its been a good week so far...I did a few presentations on sex and sexuality to a group of mostly African-Canadian youth and enjoyed it.
I am sitting here after having an argument with a close friend of mine about the nature of jealousy and anger. To me they are natural emotions that we all exert at one time or another. It is up to us as individuals to decide how we will use those emotions. I also believe that anger can be a very useful emotion, thought out our history in the west peoples of African decent have used our anger as a motivation to challenge slavery and oppression. When you listen to the speeches of people like Dr. King, Malcolm X or Angela Davis you see how they took their anger and used it to challenge the ways in which people of African decent are treated in western society. The music of people like Billie Holyday, Jill Scott-Heron and the great Nina Simone also use anger to encourage descendants of people who were brutally enslaved to fight against a system that continued to see them as second class citizens in so called free societies. The works of these people transcend borders and created Pan-African movements all through tout the Western hemisphere. This is the power of the simple emotion we call anger.
In that same token, gay and lesbian peoples have used their anger to upset the order of society which straight people have dictated to us. It is the anger of gay and lesbian activist men and women who created spaces for people like me to attend when I was a teenager and didn't understand my sexuality in this hostile world.
So I am fine with the constructive use of anger, sadly though, I don't believe most people know how to use their anger to change the systems which acts as barriers to their own happiness and prosperity. Many use anger as a way to get back at the person who fucked with them, like taking a gun and shooting someone who 'dissed' them- this is anger used in an unproductive way.
Jealousy is another emotion that can be used in a productive way. Someone once told me that her partner gets jealous easily if she is talking to someone else and she asked me if that means her partner have a undying love for her. My answer was NO.
Yes, this is jealousy but this is jealousy used to control others, her partner don't own her, she is not his little toy which he doesn't want no one else to play with, so that type of jealousy in no way equals love. However, If I look at someone having a beautiful home on the beach front and I look at that and something in me say, I wish I was that person, I wish i owned that home on the beach... this type of jealousy can be constructive if I take the steps needed to own a similar house on the beach front. As far as I see, there is nothing wrong with that type and use of jealousy, I mean we use that type of emotion almost everyday, we may not recognise it but its something that has helped us all to achieve our goals.
So there is nothing wrong with being angry or being jealous, but the way we use them makes a world of difference.
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3 comments:
Nice post there......
But isnt anger and jealous part of our diverse humanistic nature that is innate? Its application at any point in time is subject on how it is been meted out, nonetheless for the most part of it, its not conceived well because it usually relegates the other party.
While jealousy could be a little bit condoned, anger as an act of rejection due to oppression is more of less of a violence. Anger as a form of expressing one's views is the cry of a sour loser, atleast the way I see it. But persistent, passionate and tireless pushing of your views thru the power of dialogue should be the way to go by rather resort to violence.
My 2 cents!!
Well said Naijadude, both Aanger and jealousy are innate emotions which contribute to the wide range of experices we have as humans, I wrote about them because I am interested in how people manipulate these emotions in order to acheive change, whether on the personal level or at the larger societal level.
And as for violence, it is sometimes used as a phsyical way of actiing out anger and jealousy. I dont advodcate violence and I for one is not happy when I see young kids shooting down each other for some of the simplest of things. However, I analyse violence between kids as a responce to the violent society, when countries are arming themselves with the amount of nuclear weapons to destroy the entire earth on the touch of a few buttons, and threatening other nations that they have this power, do we not expect kids in those societies to be violent? We learn what we see, my post is really about using these two emotions that have been cast off as "bad" emotions for a social good.
I think you should also differentiate between jealousy and envy because what you used in the negative sense was jealousy and in the positive sense it was envy, so those must be regarded differently.
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