Just weeks after Shane Murnan was hired as an elementary school principal in Oklahoma’s Western Heights School District, the twenty-six year career educator was placed on administrative leave. An anonymous newsletter in late August revealed Murnan’s side gig as a drag performer, and this was picked up by the right-wing social media influencer Libs of TikTok which promptly posted the news to its national audience.
The social media post prompted the school superintendent Ryan Walters to make an inflammatory public announcement calling for Murnan’s firing, and almost immediately both the school and Murnan began receiving bomb threats, death threats and hate mail. Although it was unclear legally how Murnan could be fired, the superintendent’s public announcement incited considerable anger from right-wing extremist elements. Walter’s statement to a national news outlet included the following:
“I will not allow the radical left to use our school to indoctrinate our kids and promote extreme forms of sexual deviancy in the classroom and beyond.”
Sexual deviancy? Radical left? Indoctrinate our kids? Is there any evidence for any of these accusations? Murnan had been openly gay for years, and his drag performances were little more than elaborate cross-dressing to become the stage persona Shantel Mandalay, and not incidentally, to provide a second income. Yet Superintendent Walters decided to extrapolate from his personal opinions with a statement that inflamed and expanded anger, and in a way that fits nicely into established culture war rhetoric.
Murnan, an openly gay teacher, emphasized that he never tried to hide his drag career, and did not discuss it while at his day job. Community members in his district rallied in September to defend Murnan, but the school continued to receive hate mail and threats of violence. Murnan was eventually pressured to resign in late January 2024.
When anger expands along culturally established lines, it generates a great deal of attention while at the same time obscuring any facts regarding the originating event. This may be convenient for the persons throwing the anger bombs, but it is of little use in settling conflicts. Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn relates a crucial teaching of the Buddha:
“Anger can never remove anger. Anger can only promote more anger. Only understanding and compassion can put down the flame of anger in us and in the other person. Understanding and compassion is the only antidote for anger. “
Whatever one’s opinion on drag performances, it is clear that anger in itself is generally not beneficial to a fair and just society. But wait. Is anger not sometimes promoted for the express purpose of promoting more anger? This is the phenomenon of audience reception or in simpler terms, “crowd and leader.” Walters is the leader, who like most good leaders knows his audience well enough to understand how best to spark their emotions, in this case, anger mixed with hatred and based on fear.
In his 2019 book “Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up,” Koshin Paley Ellison points out that anger is a secondary, not a primary, emotion, and often comes into play when a person experiences fear or ignorance in a particular situation. There is little doubt that both Walters and his followers are fearful and ignorant of the true entertainment nature of drag performances. This is made clear by Walters’ subsequent tweet posted on X (note the subtle distortion in the language):
“Drag queens do not belong in Oklahoma schools. Zero tolerance.”
By retreating into anger, Walters, like his all-too-predictable right-wing followers, is dissembling from the originating event (and thus no longer needs to rely on the facts) while at the same time causing anger to spread in equally predictable ways.
In his 2001 book “Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames,” Thich Nhat Hanh points out that very often anger results from wrong perceptions. He urges us to carefully examine our perceptions and in effect assume that those that give rise to strong emotions are likely incorrect and therefore misleading. From these incorrect perceptions arise base emotions like fear, which if left unchecked may easily become the foundations of anger and other strong emotions.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with anger. It is a natural human emotion, and like Ellison and others have pointed out, anger can be used in skillful and powerful ways as an energy that pushes us to do some amazing things, like stopping the unjust persecution of groups or people we see as different.
Why does anger in the Walters case seem to build on itself? Thich Nhat Hanh explains (Anger, 2001) that if left unattended, we get angry too easily because “the seed of anger is too strong. And, because you have not practiced the methods for taking good care of your anger, the seed of anger has been watered too often in the past.” Attending to one’s anger means caring for it with insight and tenderness so that it transforms into positive energy.
Hanh continues, when someone shows anger toward us, “you have to be aware that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. So understanding the other is understanding yourself.” This is the insight of non-duality or interbeing, the observation that everything and everyone is connected.
So unchecked perceptions lead to a learned tendency to get angry, often seriously angry in the flash of the moment. Retreating into anger is a means of absolving oneself of the hot flames that are so hurtful to others. Yet we must not blame those who follow these tendencies for they are not the enemy. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, “our enemy is the violence, ignorance and injustice in us and in the other person.”
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