Hatred in America or: How America Learned to Stop Being Civil and Love Virulence

Americans - and on a larger scale, the rest of the civilized world - tend to employ anger as a sort of persuasive rhetoric; we (referring either to Americans or Earthlings, take your pick) take advantage of the fervid intensity that anger provokes, and we try to use it to further our arguments, under some delusion that the angrier we come across, the more persuasive our arguments must be.

Anger is at best the strategem of those whose powers of persuasion are so mediocre that they cannot find another expedient to achieve their desired purpose. Almost unfailingly, those who can retain a cool head during the heat of an argument will be better-equipped to create rational arguments - and that's another thing, the rationality: As we get angrier, the vast majority of us retrogress into a baser level of rationality - our abilities to reason and create logical arguments is severely diminished when we allow our calmness and cool-headedness to be compromised by someone attempting to agitate us.

When it comes down to it, anger has no place among the arguments of the rational. That's not to say, mind, that it's evitable: The best man or woman among us is still but a man or a woman, and our nature is wont to decline into ireful babblings when the specific core beliefs each of us hold dear are threatened.