Anger Management - Learning from #CDM25

A Malaysian young woman made headlines recently when a video of her bashing a helpless senior citizen’s car was caught on camera and released to the social media. The video went viral with lots of comments made in the internet. The two-and-half minute video showing the woman, enraged that her Peugeot 208 had been hit by a car driven by an elderly man, alighting from her vehicle, armed with a car steering lock. Despite the old man repeatedly pleading that he hadn’t intended to hit her car on purpose, the woman continued to yell at him, and even “deployed” her steering wheel lock at his car.

The woman’s temper and behavior leads to series of “discussion” in cyberspace, with almost unanimous agreement that the woman was bad-mannered. The #CDM25 hashtag trended on Twitter and Facebook both locally and internationally since the video was published. Overnight, the woman has turn into Malaysia’s latest “public enemy #1″, for obvious reasons.

What can we learn from this whole incident? I think anger management is a key lesson point here. When we fail to control our anger, then obvious reaction takes place such as being disrespectful, uttering racist statement and violent. In our moment of uncontrolled anger, we flares up like a match-stick when a friction is applied.  It is always important to remember a good old quote that says a match-stick has a head but it does not have a brain. Let us learn from this analogy between match-stick and a human brain. All of us has head and a brain as well. Let us resolve to use our brain and not to react on impulse. The great management guru, Steven Covey address this issue with a brilliant statement, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.” We can’t control all of the stimuli that comes on our way on a daily basis, but to a large degree we can choose what our response is going to be. We need to be responsible on how we respond in a given situation.

To the young woman in this latest fiasco, here is one advice for you quoting from Saint Ambrose: “A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to her parents, to give honor to her elders, to preserve her purity; she ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years.”