My anger speaks, saying to whoever has wronged me through ignorance or error, especially through enforcing an unconscionable policy, especially when such policy is imagined or illegal, to you it says this:

I know your behavior is your honest best, and that you are upholding some “higher purpose,” like keeping your job or licking the boot on all our faces (or something) and yet, you have erred, you are wrong, and that wrongness hurts me. As such, I do not accept your apology, and I disagree when you say there’s nothing you can do because I can think of several things you just won’t do. When you wish me a nice day, I can only take it as insincere because your actions are simultaneously making my day worse.

As such, I do not wish you a nice day. I wish that you come back later in your mind to your behavior now, and that it troubles you. I wish that your error is corrected in your mind with an appropriate spike of shame as you mourn and bewail that you have wronged me by your mistake, your culpable mistake, believing a lie in your mind rather than the truth that common sense could explain to you (and that I was there, ready to explain, should common sense fail).

You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Shame hurts, and pain is good because it teaches lessons, and you need a lesson taught. “No pain, no gain,” they say, and it’s time for you to get those gains in your brains, gains in knowledge, in empathy.

The amount of shame should be for slightly more than the amount of wasted, unnecessary pain you caused me, pain that served me no purpose because I wasn’t the one who was wrong, pain that was just tragedy, pain for which my only lesson was how to best stand up for myself—a dubious lesson—and which I could, best case, use as inspiration to demand better from the system you have (erroneously and culpably) decided to endorse and embody for me today.

For those who have wronged me a little, a shudder and a “whoopsie” might suffice. For some who have wronged my loved ones or myself with deep crimes of harassment or of battery, maybe a little more shame is called for—by which I mean a lot more.

For the criminals I have had the misfortune of meeting in person, for the criminals in leadership who have wronged me and my loved ones from a distance, and likely many others, for those who uphold a flawed system, how can we make you learn? What shame would suffice? What amount of punishment could possibly balance the scales of justice?

Must it go beyond pain from shame to justice enacted on the body? Corporal punishment, either the honest whip of the lash or the insidious deprivation of liberty and deprivation of years of your life? I know—prison is worse torture than corporal punishment, fundamentally unconscionable—but then again, perhaps even that is not enough for some criminals.

If there is more guilt than can be expiated in a lifetime, what then? Do you have descendents? Reincarnations? Can this lesson that clearly needs to be taught be manifested in pain for them instead? Or will this be met with impunity, so everyone sees a sign on my back and knows that there is open season?

Why is the divine justice so lazy? They say “what goes around comes around” or nowadays “fuck around and find out”—but whatever force or entity or person or spirit or deity or principle that enacts that statement is clearly real and powerful and dreadful and also indolent and lazy.

Or do all my enemies somehow magically deserve mercy? Or have I just sinned overly much as a child? Or is justice just a statistical artifact that fails to actually balance the ledgers, or are we as creatures wedded to a creator not worth their salt?

When will the Judge of judges hear my case? Can divine vengeance be prooked, divine justice expedited? Is there paperwork I can fill out? The app returns 404.

Thus speaks my anger. And while I can tell the people around me they ought to be ashamed, scold them like a boomer, ask to speak to their manager, and wish them proportionate suffering for their error, it will do no good. Because the vengeance isn’t coming, and wishing for it just makes me look like I’m wrong. Even though I’m not.

They’re not listening, the manager isn’t listening, and the divine isn’t listening. So where can I put all this energy that has built up?