What do the following have in common?
- ?Too big to fail? government bailouts.
- Executive pay on Wall Street.
- The absence of universal health care in America.
- The influence of lobbyists on government.
All of the above should immediately generate profound outrage among all of our citizens, regardless of their geography, race, ethnicity, politics, or religion. People should be mad as hell for the time, energy, money, and resources that are being spent on things that are either counter to the best interests of most Americans or just plain unimportant. There should be protests in the streets, sit-ins on the mall in our capital, and midnight vigils. Yet, the only group from whom we see visible outrage these days is the lunatic fringe who are more interested in imposing its ideologies on us than doing what?s best for the American people.
So I wondered, is public outrage dead?
In a government that seems to be controlled by special interests, are ordinary Americans suffering from learned helplessness in which they have surrendered to the belief that they have no influence over the decisions that are made in Washington that directly impact them?
Is the current economic climate so bad for so many Americans that they have become focused on simply surviving and don?t have the time or energy to register outrage?
Because of the profound instability in the world, are many Americans simply burying their heads in the sand because they just don?t want to acknowledge all of the problems with which they are faced?
Or have the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, and the political divisiveness in Washington simply worn Americans out?
Then I thought, wait a minute, perhaps the outrage is out there, it?s just not so visible or noisy. This is, after all, the 21st century and there are many ways to express our outrage that simply didn?t exist 20 years ago. In voicing our outrage, we want bang for our buck; if we express outrage, we want to know that we will be heard. And, though public protests may be cathartic and provide good theater, they don?t reach a very wide audience and their impact is uncertain.
The Internet has given us a new ?megaphone? through which to communicate our outrage. It has given us an unprecedented vehicle to share that outrage with millions of people. Outrage 2.0 arrived in full force during the 2008 presidential election and continues in full force. Outrage has gone all tech and viral on us.
The current health-care debate demonstrates the power of Outrage 2.0. I began to search for outrage over health care on the Web and found it in spades, on both sides of the political aisle. On web sites, in blogs and their comments, through emails, texting, and on-line petitions and donations, by way of Facebook and Twitter, people on both sides of the debate have been speaking out (though I’m not sure the members of Congress have actually been listening).
So outrage is alive and well and living in America. It isn?t a visibly public or loud outrage, yet it can be heard in every corner of America and, hopefully, in the White House and halls of Congress. Though the tag line for the 1979 science-fiction film Alien tells us that ?In space no one can hear you scream,? in cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream.
