Anger

There's an excellent article over on Marianne's blog - Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping. I borrowed the following quote from her:
“Anybody can become angry,” Aristotle wrote, “that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.”

Aristotle’s voice is reasoned but difficult to hear. Emerging from the most violent century in human history, we are much quicker to recall examples of anger tied to physical abuse, violence and discrimination. Surely, we think, anger must be removed entirely from our lives. And yet, Saint Thomas Aquinas ... commended an anger which ... can, when governed by reason and will, be called “morally excellent.”
Anger is a neutral and necessary force—for moral excellence, for authentic mercy and justice—pulsing within every human heart which sees and senses that something is not right. To borrow a common metaphor, we are “hard-wired” with anger. Erasing it from our lives would leave us defenseless and voiceless in the face of evil. Anger is a traveling companion of courage on the road to justice and truth.

I try to imagine a world where no anger stirs men and women to dream and to bring about the impossible. ... It is a far crueler and more inhumane world than what we know today, for it is a world without William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa…"