A new chain restaurant is popping up around the country called “The Affrontery.” It’s a place you can go to be mildly outraged at things you don’t really care about. A place where you can loudly air your imaginary grievances. And you can share your outrage with other people who also pretend to be affronted by the same things, and you can build off each others’ offended sensibilities until your anger starts to feel real to you. And you can all feel clever when you ALL use the exact same phrases, as devoid of meaning as your anger is devoid of feeling, until the words somehow become a homing signal to the outraged. You and your new friends can fuel the fire of your ire by telling each other shocking things you misread on social media or half-heard on the news, where feeding manufactured outrage is the only form of discourse, the lowest form of discourse. This kind of hunger for hate and this desperate thirst for indignation leaves people vulnerable, and they’ll devour whatever you are sold, you’ll order everything on the menu.

What’s on the menu? Of course, this will be fast food, freezer-to-fryer stuff, soaking in the rancid grease of entitlement, hypocrisy, prejudice, resentment, and ignorance. It will not be enriching or sustaining in any way. It will leave you feeling ill but strangely hungry for more and more. And what begins as mild irritation at people who frighten you because they’re slightly different from you in any way at all, will grow and build into a real terror that civilization as you know and define it is at risk. Though, of course, you’ll know it’s not true, not nearly true. It’s just that the anger is so addictive, so infectious, the feeling of being included in this gang of self-righteous haters so delicious, that you’ll tell yourself you believe it. You’ll order it again and again and gobble it up.

And the waiters will run, screaming, to the exits.

Online orders will be strong at this establishment because it’s custom-made for the Internet. Maybe people have always been this way; but surely the ease of talking on the internet, the shallowness of connection, and the anonymity of the speaker contribute to the cruelty of the rhetoric. In small towns everywhere, people are unfailingly kind when they meet in person at the local coffee shop or diner, but unnervingly abusive on the community Facebook page. Somehow, on the internet, reasonable adults are turned into middle school bullies. Or maybe it’s just that this sadly human instinct is given room to grow. The sickening feeling of join-or-become-a-target is depressingly familiar. And people gut-sick from sour grapes, bloated from greasy imagined grievances, will take to the internet to tell you how anything beautiful or sustaining is strange, suspect, and dangerous.

Perhaps the saddest thing about the false fury peddled in these establishments is that it belittles actual anger. In a grotesque twist, this mock outrage is often directed at people who actually have something to be angry about. Because real anger is powerful, and that is frightening to people trying to cling onto whatever power they feel they are entitled to. Real anger is an agent for change, so they try to subvert it and represent it as hysteria or categorize it as nonsense. Women and other marginalized people recognize this treatment. The anger of the Black Lives Matter movement and the current anger of the pro-Palestinian protests was/is described as revolution, chaos, or worse. But on January 6th an insurrection fueled by ignorance and affrontery was described as a pleasant tour through the capitol by very fine people.

The entire history of our flawed nation is so grotesquely, predictably skewed. This false anger has sustained us for as long as we’ve existed because we’re desperately trying to cover the devastating depths of justified anger we are terrified to acknowledge. It is a bitter truth, but one that we must reckon with.