It seems that, at least in America, we’re rage-deficient, a passive-aggressive generation, if you will. We bottle up our rage at our jobs, at those around us, at wars, all to maintain a sense of comfort in the known. What I am saying is nothing new, nothing extraordinary – it is probably a clichéd platitude by now – but that doesn’t make it any less true. The question that needs to be asked, however, is where has the rage gone? Where is the purifying, obsessive voice that the emotion lends to human individuals?
Rage is indignation mated with aggression. We have no deficient of indignation, entitlement, resentment, envy, etc.
What we need isn’t rage, but a rage for creation of a new culture and new nation to replace what has become a tired shadow of its past imitating that past while nodding to the future, like a heroin addict on the nod.
I find that the best of classical music has this rage for order, or vir.