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So Many Things
Essay by Martina Cole

So many things make me angry. So many things touch me on a daily basis, make me sad, make me despair of ever seeing justice done in this country for the people who really need and deserve it. The old, the sick, the disabled, the vulnerable, the lonely, and the forgotten.

I feel angry about a society that is obsessed with celebrity, and who will happily read about Britney Spears and Posh and Becks while skipping over the news of the war in Iraq.

I feel angry about a world where predators, who once had to scour the streets for victims, can now quietly enter our homes through what was probably the greatest invention of our times, the internet.

I feel angry about how easy it is to access our private and personal lives, how easy it is to steal someone’s identity and thereby benefit from their hard work and industrious nature by remortgaging their house, or clearing their bank accounts.

I feel angry about the elderly, about people who lived through wars so we could have a better life and are now treated as if they are nothing by a government which, it seems to me, has no care for these people at all. People who have so much to offer with their wisdom, and their strength, but who are now referred to as dinosaurs.

These are people who believed in a health service, who paid into it willingly, and who now find that it is letting them down badly. Who are expected to live for a week on what most people drop on a night out with friends. Who also have too much pride to let on how difficult their day-to-day existence is.

I feel strongly about so many things and I didn’t even realise it. And I think modern life is breeding an anger inside many people that seems to permeate most of our lives even though most of us don’t act on it.

I get angry every day, but, like most people, the anger dissipates almost immediately. It’s as if anger has become a standard reaction. Something that erupts quickly then dissolves even faster. Perhaps not holding on to anger is just self-preservation for the twenty-first century. Nature’s way of helping us compensate for living in a very fast, very loud, very enervating society. Stopping us becoming violent, tempering anger, so we don’t become the subject of a column in a newspaper.

Road rage, trolley rage, any kind of rage. These modern-day epithets do not so much explain anger as trivialise it. They make allowances for it, as if modern life gives us the excuse to do what we like when we like. Hey, someone thinks, a doctor recognises my excessive anger so it must be all right. I have a right to feel so aggressive.

When I research my novels I find out so much about the modern day that it frightens even me at times and, believe me, I am not easily frightened.

Read the complete So Many Things essay in the Asda Book Club edition of Hard Girls

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