The last few days I have been listening to the various pundits discuss the debacle at Walter Reed Military Hospital. If you haven’t been following it, this link will help. In short, Building 18 at the hospital complex is rat and roach infested AND those wounded soldiers living in it are swamped with bureaucratic barriers and are unable to get the proper treatment they need.
Enter righteous indignation. Here are the soldiers who have willingly gone to the front and served their country. During their heroic service, they were wounded and need our help? How do we treat them? Warehouse them, ignore them, make it difficult to get adequate treatment. How is it, we ask, that commanding officers, congress, the president, did not know about this and did not do something about it? This IS an outrage. Heads have and should roll.
Of course many people capable of making it an issue knew of the problem. Presumably, they deemed the situation tragic, problematic, but the best we can do at the moment. It was on their list of things to get done, but with a zillion other pressing issues, it sunk to the bottom of the pile. But we who were not responsible for the situation (and even some who might have had political power to do something) have the privilege of feeling righteously indignant. How could this have happened? We would never have allowed such a travesty to happen. It feels good to be sure of ourselves and what we would have done or not done. We feel superior
In fact, some good comes from our indignation. We repeat it, we shame those who ignored it, they either do something or get fired and someone else does something and SOME of the problem gets corrected. This pattern is evident in the reactions to bad care for kids under the protection of the State of NJ, to the problems in the Catholic priesthood, even to the most recent ice storm where drivers were stranded on I78 for 24 hours.
But here’s the danger to our souls. Indignation over other people’s obvious failures causes us to be less likely to hold the same attention to our own hidden messes. Each one of us lives with things that, if brought to light by others, we would be embarrassed by. There’s something about the light of truth (and an audience) that suddenly makes clear that we haven’t been minding the store. This is called self-deception. But that is not the only place where we can miss important matters. We also make choices everyday to attend to some issues and not to attend to others. Some things are pushed to the back burner because we make pragmatic (what can I do right now, what can I afford) decisions. If I can’t afford to put a new roof on my house and pay my mortgage, then I’ll probably let my roof go another month. And so it goes. If I wait long enough, the roof might cave in. Obviously, once the cave in happens it is so apparent that if I had just had the new roof 10 years ago, my house wouldn’t need 40,000 dollars worth of work. But, it never seemed that I was making that decision. This is called short-term focus with a long-term paralysis. This shows up in staying in a dead-end job longer than we should, not intervening sooner in a friend’s marital conflict, etc.
What should we do? Yes, be angry about broken things. Use it to right injustices. Use it to examine your own life. Be brave enough to let another examine your life as well.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 
I like to think of it as identifying with rather than just identifying. You can identify lots of problems and feel righteous indignation but if you identify with then you can do the more important work on yourself that you had been neglecting. Identifying with uses the anger that we feel at some outside event and directs it to ourselves so that we actually make change. I can identify with Walter Reed in having some roaches in my life that are ugly but that I just don’t want to get rid of yet because I’m afraid of the work it will take.