I sat at the stop light last week at Howe 'Bout Arden and watched the usual transpire. The light turned dull green in front of us, yet three cars made the decision anyway to send their hulking monsters of rubber and steel careening into the breach under a full red sky. People honked, glared and cursed. One of the kamikaze pilots whipped his front bumper so close to mine that I doubt I could have dragged my ATM card between them. I watched his face as he passed by. He was angry, determined and offered no apologies. "To hell with you," I think was the message.

Later that day, as my 2-year-old son and I were driving out of the local mall, I saw two tough guys sizing up a kid walking ten feet in front of them who was so wired into his Walkman that he was oblivious. Then one of the thugs broke into a run toward the kid, pumping his arms in preparation for a surprise attack.

But the attack never happened, because I drove down hard on my horn as my car slashed past them into the far lane.

One minute I'm jostling my youngest son in his car seat and making jokes, the next I'm trying to figure out how to respond to his new mantra, "What happah Daddy?... What happah Daddy?..."

But that wasn't nearly the end of my day. Later, as I was driving to work, a woman in a shiny black BMW came so hard and fast into my path that I thought, for a brief moment, that her car was an advertisement. There she was--in her 4,000-pound vehicle--trying to blend into my traffic lane like a sumo wrestler at the nine-items or less checkstand.

I used the horn again--a sober medium blast to communicate that I still wished to survive until lunchtime. She responded with a cold hard glare, then saluted me with the silent single-digit sign for intimate union.

I was a bit unnerved by then, so I turned on the radio. Talk radio Wow! What charisma! What conviction! What righteous indignation! As I listened to Rush Limbaugh, and later to Jerry Brown, I couldn't help but get the mental picture of two pit bulls whose rear quarters have been surgically attached. Whether you approach from the right or left, you're confronted with a rabid foam of slashing white teeth.

It seemed to me that anger was in the air, and everyone around me was taking in full, deep breaths.

The next morning, I caught an interview with Salman Rushdie on NPR's Fresh Air. The controversial author, who is still living under a death sentence, added to my growing preoccupation with anger when he flatly asserted that "rage has become an acceptable value in the modem world."

Rage has become an acceptable value in the modern world?

Rushdie started describing what he thinks is a global shift--white-hot rage has replaced the Cold War with hundreds of smaller, more overt and immediately bloody wars and acts of terrorism. I started thinking of the immediate dynamics in Northern Ireland, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Algeria. Many, if not all, of these conflicts are civil wars of one kind or another. But we don't have to look any farther than our own Bible-belt backyard to find the same atrocities. Acts of civilian terrorism in America, so coldly illustrated by theUnabomber and Oklahoma City, are by definition acts of civil war which were driven by rage.

Now obviously, most Americans are not involved in civilian terrorism. But all of us digest huge doses of processed rage, violence, and cynicism every day through television, radio and newsprint. Like the spectacle of the stampeding bulls racing through the streets of Pamplona, Americans are more and more captivated by the raging bulls of media who sniff, snort and gore with rage. And it is changing the way we see the world around us.

Why has rage become all the rage?

I decided to forge out into the streets of Sacramento to find out for myself whether rage has indeed become the new American value. I checked my bank balance and figured I could get at least as far as a couple double mochas at a local coffeehouse. As I sat down in the Capitol Garage Cafe, a large, cavernous, er ... well, garage of a place across from the state Capitol on L Street, I realized it was exactly the sort of unscientific laboratory that I needed to conduct my survey.

For six hours, I sat and listened to conversations, searching for signs of rage. What I found instead was a soft of mediocre version of rage.

People seem more "pissed-off," which is different from being fully enraged. Rage externalizes, pissed-off internalizes. Rage goes "postal," pissed-off complains, whines and fumes.

I learned this: People are pissed at politicians and lawyers; pissed at greedy sports heroes and team owners; pissed at their enslaving employers; pissed at co-workers who plot and prattle instead of produce; and pissed that no one property understands the primary importance of their position in the Universe. They are pissed at the angry Fundamentalists; pissed at the secular humanists, pissed at the Pro-lifers who care nothing for the well-being of the mother, and pissed at the Pro-choicers because "pro-choice" is really the choice to have sex, followed by another choice to snuff the obvious results. The angry white males are pissed because they're starting to feel cheated; the angry black males are pissed because they never got the chance to feel cheated; and women are pissed because they have been cheated on. People are pissed at fathers, mothers, ex-wives and brothers. Pissed at sons and daughters, and all the in-laws who are now outlaws.

It seemed that everyone was pissed except the two guys sitting at the curb, looking down serenely at the oil-crusted pavement. and at each other before gently passing a brown paper-wrapped bottle back and forth between them.

But after that, I could no longer hear what people were pissed about because across the street, two state gardeners with high-powered semi-automatic blowers had kicked those things into high gear, sending sack-fulls of smoke, dead grass and dust into the air in a howling, deaf-droning roar. As wave upon wave of loud soupy debris washed into the Capitol Garage Cafe, I saw the first flickering hints of true rage. If these people had someone to lead them, they would rise up into a rolling collective junta which, gaining force and numbers every day, would not rest until it had exterminated every blower and pressed wooden rakes into the hands of all who had previously possessed them.

That didn't happen, of course.

So what is to be learned about rage?

First, we need to consider that from Ancient Greece to the present, rage has never made it into the book of virtues. In Western tradition, it been marked as one of the "seven deadly sins." In the East, it is associated with the problem of attachment to the illusory world around us.Ê In either case, it is clearly understood as a dead-end to be avoided rather than a road to be taken.

Second, we need to consider the self-devouring nature of rage. Theologian Frederick Buechner points out that as delicious as our feasts of anger and vengeance may be, the skeleton that is left at the end of the meal is us.

Third, we need to be honest that our anger has to do with our own bloated expectations. We get pissed when others ignore our primary place at the center of the universe. When you cut me off on the road, I expect swift and fiery justice; when I do it to you, I expect mercy and understanding. That's gotta go. If I want mercy, I have to give it. If I want you to listen to me, I must learn how to listen to you. In other words, I need to begin to give you what I truly need, because it is the only way you are ever going to get it. It can't happen any other way.

After I finished writing the last paragraph, I shut my writing pad, collected my stuff and headed for the door. As I walked away from the cafe, I could hear the two men I had been sitting next to talking. "Did you see that guy sit there and write in his journal the whole time we were talking?"

"Yeah, he was engrossed. Ha! Obviously, he thinks his opinions are pretty important."

"Yeah, guys like that really piss me off."

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