I need to get political with you for just a minute. Stay with me. I’m not going to try to sell you something at the end. I just need to be heard.

I was raised in a loving, supportive family that taught me temperance is the greatest virtue. Somehow temperance has become avoidance of anger and an inability to talk about the most difficult things. I have become allergic to anger.

Sometimes anger is the only appropriate response. Anger has to be okay. Anger has to useful.

Jesus was angry. Martin Luther King was angry. Gandhi was angry.

Their anger was useful because they used it.

I am angrier than I have ever been in my entire life.

Our country is broken. I don’t need one more person to tell me it is broken because we have a black, liberal president or because gay people can get married or because transgender people suddenly need a place to pee or because another government official misused her email and tried to lie about it.

Our country is broken because we have been fighting the wrong wars in the wrong places for the wrong reasons.

Our country is broken because some police officers are afraid of black men and are using the authority we have lent to kill them.

Our country is broken because a black man targets and kills white police officers as an act of political speech.

Our country is broken because we answer the spreading problem of gun violence with more guns and an inability to study the problem as a social health issue.

Our country is broken because we can’t talk about income disparity as something that has more to do with accidents of race and geography than it is has to do with the willingness and ability of a person to do useful, meaningful work.

This isn’t a Republican/Democrat thing.

Most of our leaders are failing us. Some of them don’t want to help. Some of them don’t know how.

We have got to stop talking about other people needing to fix our problems. They can’t and they won’t.

This anger I feel is useful, but if I don’t start using this anger someone else is going to use it or me. If I allow someone else to use my anger, they are most likely to be using it against me.