Angry Men....Why Are They So Angry?

When someone who is supposed to love you doesn't - it makes you angry.

Have you ever wanted something really bad and couldn't get it? At first you probably felt sad, but then after awhile your sadness turned to anger.

Anger, oftentimes, is a mechanism we use to protect ourselves from pain. The human mind is designed to avoid pain. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a survival tool. Pain let's us know that something is not right. If you put your hand on a hot stove the pain let's you know you need to remove your hand in order to protect itself from getting burnt. That pain gauge is there to keep you alive. That's a good thing.

However, our minds are tricky little gangsters and at times they can hold us hostage to pain. And what I see today is there's a mafia of gangsters holding men hostage to anger. They come in with guns loaded and pull the trigger on men's hearts. They're calloused killers. Once they've unloaded all their rounds on these men's hearts they throw their wounded, bleeding hearts in the back of their trunks, and once they stop beating, they bury their love.

When God created Adam in the Garden of Eden (aka Paradise), He said it was "not good for man to be alone." (Genesis 2:18) If God Himself said it was not good for Adam to be alone and Adam was in Paradise, where things couldn't have gotten better, then obviously God had a reason for saying this. It's because it's not good for man to be alone.

God is a relational God. Even though He is God and He is perfect and all powerful He still wants a relationship with us. Why else did He create humans? Did God need humans? No. God is in need of nothing, however, what's amazing about God is that He wanted us. Some say He created us to worship Him, but I disagree. Why would God need us to worship Him? He doesn't. He already knows He's magnificent. He doesn't need anybody to tell Him or remind Him that He's amazing.

But, He desired to have someone to commune with Him and have a relationship with Him. God desires intimacy and worship is intimate. So, when we worship Him it creates intimacy between us and God. That's why He likes worship, not because it tells Him He's awesome, but because it creates relationship and intimacy with Him.

So, if God, the Creator of the Universe did not want to be alone, how much more is it not good for us to be alone? God designed men and women to fit together perfectly, biologically and emotionally. By nature men are physically stronger than women and therefore, are created to be the protectors of their families. They also tend to be less emotional than women and operate more from a strategical, logistical and factual side of things.

Whereas women operate more from emotions and intuition. One is not better than the other, just different. They're both necessary attributes and equally important. If little Johnny falls and scrapes his leg his mother is there to scoop him up in her arms, hug him and clean up his cut. His father is there to say, "Boy, you're all right. Get up." Both are necessary. Without one or the other it creates an imbalance.

The mother is there to provide sympathy and compassion, letting her son know that she cares about his pain. This ensures that when he grows up he won't be indifferent to other people's suffering, that he'll have a caring heart that has the desire to be a protector of those who are defenseless and cannot protect themselves. It will make him a loving father and husband.

The father's reaction is there to strengthen his son, to ensure that when life throws punches his way he's not debilitated by his pain. It teaches him how to get up when he falls and not to be controlled by emotions, which is a necessary factor in order to be a protector.

Mothers and fathers are both equally important in children's lives. So, what happens when we remove one or the other from kids lives? Something ends up missing.

We are innately designed to desire the love, affirmation and acceptance from our parents. When we don't get that we find ourselves on a quest to find the missing link, and sometimes we don't even realize what's missing until something breaks.

And today we have a culture full of broken men...and angry men. The prisons are full of them. I know because I work with them every week.

One time I was teaching a class at a men's maximum-security prison and we began talking about the epidemic of fatherlessness. I asked the class about their fathers. Most of them didn't have good memories with their fathers. The majority had either never met their father, or only knew him briefly when he would come in and out of their lives, or he was in their life, but they didn't have a good relationship with him.

Winston, one of the men from the class said, "None of the boys in my neighborhood had fathers in their homes. I only had one friend who had a father in his home and he was white." It's no secret that the African-American community has been hit the hardest with this epidemic. Almost two-thirds of our African-American homes are suffering from fatherlessness.

It's not that it's not a problem in the rest of our demographics, because it is. It's just that they're being hit the hardest compared with the others. These are the statistics regarding fatherless homes according to data from the Annie E. Kasey Foundation Kids Count Data Center as of 2017:

African-American - 65%

American-Indian - 54%

Hispanic or Latino - 41%

Caucasian - 24%

Asian and Pacific Islander - 15%

Now, let's take a look at how this fatherlessness translates into other areas. In recent years there's been a lot of talk about the disparity between the incarceration between black and white men. The usual rhetoric usually only focuses on one particular aspect revolving either around racial profiling and police brutality or the flip side of the conversation where people try to argue the point that blacks are responsible for more crime.

One could argue for or against both of these points based on statistics. For example, according to data reported on the Pew Research Center by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2016 blacks represented 12 percent of the U.S. adult population, but 33 percent of those in prison. Whites represented 64 percent of adults, but 30 percent of prisoners. Another way to look at this, in 2016 there were 1,608 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – more than five times the imprisonment rate for whites - 274 per 100,000.

So, while black incarceration rates are decreasing there's still a major disparity between blacks and whites in prison.

In order to fairly analyze this let's take a look at the disparity amongst blacks and whites when it comes to violent crime, for instance homicide.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1980 and 2008 blacks committed 52 percent of all homicides and were the victims of 47 percent of the homicides. Whites committed 45 percent of all homicides and were the victims of homicide 50 percent of the time during this same period. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher and the victimization rate was six times higher.

So, for the sake of argument we could say that both of those focal points have some validity, however, it would be ignorant to ignore a much more glaring factor - the absent father syndrome.

Statistics show that children who grow up without fathers are 11 times more likely to be violent. Eighty-five percent of youth in prison come from fatherless homes. Now when we go back and look at the disparity between black and white homes without fathers we can see a direct correlation. The disparity between black and white incarceration and levels of violence seems to have a whole lot less to do with racial genetics and a whole lot more to do with absent fathers in our communities.

When a person who is supposed to love you doesn't it makes you angry, period. It doesn't matter whether you are red, yellow, black or white, it makes you angry. Duche, a Caucasian male said, "All I wanted as a boy was to know my real father." But when his father never came he said, "It made me angry and anger always turned to violence for me."

This violence and underlying desire for a father's love would eventually lead to a lifestyle that ended him up in prison, housed with other angry men with desires to be loved by their fathers locked in their trunks.

But these murdered hearts don't always land men in prison. These gangsters are good at hiding the evidence. Sometimes they hide under triceps and biceps. Other times they hide behind athletics or climbing ladders in careers. Another place they like to hide is under women's sheets. But, eventually their skeletons start to fall out of the closet.

That's when the brutality of this war starts to get messy.

The grown man who has been trying to hide the broken pieces of a boy's heart that was shattered from the denial of his father's love, eventually grows wearing of trying to mask the pieces, and that's when the bones make their way to the surface.

Whenever these gangsters see love or commitment it sends them running. They fear that if anyone gets too close to their heart they'll realize they're a serial killer of love. Their first murder was unintentional. They longed for their father to love them. Many nights the tears fell from the pain of the father who never came. Their hearts ached, but when the thing they longed for never came they figured it was easier to kill their heart and bury their love than ever go through that kind of pain again.

Then one day they met a woman who caused their heart to start to beat again, but that little boy came out the closet like a ghost dragging his bleeding heart to remind him of that first murder.

Dead bones don't bleed. It's easier to leave it buried than to have commit another murder. Why cause all that unnecessary pain and mess? The bones are dead. They're dry. They're clean. Love is pain and the only way to stop the pain is to kill it. Love is messy. Keep it clean.

But, he decides not to listen to that little boy. He opens the trunk and he gets his heart out. Then just like the little boy said, he feels the pain of love and his heart starts bleeding again. So, he does what he knows, he kills it. He puts his heart back in the trunk and takes off in his getaway car to hide the evidence. Then in a dark, far off place he buries his love back with those other bones.

All this killing makes him distant, elusive to the women in his life and even his own children for fear of that serial killer returning. But, deep inside this killer desires to be loved. He desires intimacy. So, he searches for it in other ways. He tries to convince himself that he can make up for this loss through quantity - sports, accolades, women; but none of this quantity fills that hole in his soul, and that leaves him still on the hunt for what he really desires - to love and be loved.

And this hunt that always turns up empty or ends in another murder and him on the run, begins to make him angry. Very angry. And angry people are hard to love, which only makes him angrier and causes him to run more.

But, if he would only stop running long enough he would realize that the true serial killer is not him, but these gangsters in his heart that are holding his love hostage. And instead of killing another heart he needs to kill this mafia and bury their bones instead of his love.

Then the next time that little boy comes out of the closet dragging that bleeding heart the man can let the little boy know that they're safe, that he's buried the killer, and it's okay to come out of hiding.

He can tell the little boy, just like the father told him when he scraped his knee, that just because there's pain and he's bleeding, it's okay to get up.

It's time to start beating again.