Searching for resentments

by erics1100paces

I woke up late this morning and missed the morning meeting.  This gave me some time to do a little internetting.  I clicked on a link I’ve been avoiding because I knew it would make me mad.  It did.  It seems like most of the resentments I have are towards people I don’t know – towards abstractions really.  Of actual real resentments, I’ve only come up with a couple.

There’s a colleague who yelled at me in the fall of 2013.  I resent her because the thing she yelled at me about was unfair.  She accused me of stepping on her toes in her event, but that’s not what happened.  I had tried to inform her of what I was going to do, but couldn’t because she was speaking to a group, and I was unable to get her attention.  So I ran my plan by another colleague, and he agreed that my action needed to be taken.  The motivation for taking the action I took was pure.  It needed to be done, and scheduling required that it be done when I did it.  She never gave me a chance to explain, and never apologized.  I was accused unjustly.

There’s my current roommate.  On two occasions, as documented here previously, he got upset with me, spoke his mind, and then did not allow me to speak my side of things.  That’s unjust.  And his general fussiness has required me to take a lot of measures to prevent him from becoming upset.  That’s been annoying.

There’s a guy who sucker punched me some years back.  I was sitting in my car and he was standing in the street.  By the time I got out of the vehicle, he had landed quite a few blows.  He ended up knocking me out.  I came to lying in the street.  Then I stood up, saw him standing in the friend’s house in front of which I was parked, ran inside and attacked him.  Then he ran out and locked himself in his car with his girlfriend.  I stood outside the car and yelled at him to come out and fight.  He argued inside with his girlfriend and soon drove away.  He later bragged about how he had beaten me up.  That was unfair.  I paused in my typing to have a violent fantasy in which I smashed the window of his car with a rock, and then dragged him from the vehicle and beat the shit out of him.  That fucking bitch.  I shouldn’t have let him drive away.  He was very unfair.

I used to resent my ex-wife, but I don’t anymore, because the overall deal was fair.  Yes she cheated on me, but that was good because it ended that marriage.  And I more or less kept the kid.  I have and have had custody for much much more than half of the hours of my daughter’s 15 years of life.  An excellent deal, all things considered.

That’s about it, really.  Everyone else I resent is abstract:

I resent people who don’t play by the rules, and those who abuse their authority, and those who perpetrate injustice on others.  I resent Vladimir Putin.  I resent George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Barack Obama.  I resent college debaters who run performance based race kritiks and ignore the time limits.*  I resent prosecutors because they’ve chosen a profession that treats people like pieces in an abstract game, ignoring the actual evil impact of their actions on real lives.  I resent the cops.  I resent every person who perpetrates the drug war, or who enforces or participates in it, including judges who hand down sentences and legislators who write the laws.

There.  My fourth step is done.**

*That’s what the article that made me mad this morning was about.

**Yes, I am joking.  I’m sure there’s plenty of paperwork to be completed.  The tricky part is going to be the column where I talk about my role in things.  If I had a substantial role in causing something bad, then I don’t resent it.  I blame myself.