Cross Currents: Anger, Anger, Everywhere

Uncontrolled anger. It seems to be everywhere all the time.

In Shelbyville, KY, a customer shot out a drive-thru window when she didn’t get a fork and napkin with her order.

In Hawaii, airport police had to taser an irate passenger who threw a fit because his luggage didn’t arrive with him.

Cops in Florida reported a weird case of road rage. They arrested some furious guy who spat food into the face of a woman driver who was trying to apologize to him for whatever she did to tic him off.

In northern Minnesota, Angelo Borreson was charged with murder after he fatally shot a woman who honked her horn and yelled at him to hurry up. Police said she had come to his home to help him, but temper trumped thankfulness.

Albuquerque Journal reported that Joe Macias got into an argument with his wife and doused her with gasoline. He intended to incinerate her, but he was the one who was inflamed. With rage.

Okies have to deal with it, too. In Dell City, OK, two customers got so mad about a blooper on their chicken order that they smashed Sonic’s glass door. At least, they attacked the door instead of the ordertaker.

At a McDonald’s in Ohio, though, it was the employee, not the customer, who lost it. She got so upset with a customer that she threw a blender in the lady’s face and broke her chin and jaw.

A truck driver on I-75 in Georgia was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after he got shot several times in what appeared to be a case of road rage.

A six-year-old boy on a Los Angeles freeway was not so lucky. Strapped in his booster seat in his mother’s pickup, he had done nothing to deserve his fate, but a bullet fired in a fit of road rage ended his life.

Anger also boiled over in St. Louis when a female sheriff told some gal that she couldn’t come inside a gas station without a mask. The enraged customer gave the sheriff a concussion when she clobbered the officer with her own baton.

Anger. Everywhere. All the time. Uncontrolled wrath seems to be breaking out all across our land.

Headlines just keep validating James’ warning that our anger seldom makes us do something God would approve. That’s why he counsels us, “Be slow to get angry.”

Gene Shelburne may be addressed at 2310 Anna St., Amarillo, TX 79106-4717 or at GeneShel@aol.com.