Last week, the world witnessed the display of three kinds of emotions in the wake and aftermath of the hostage drama in front of the Quirino Grandstand.
First, the hostage-taker's rage.
Second, the anger of the people of Hong Kong.
Third, a national mourning called for by the President.
Is rage different from anger? Medical experts believe there is a clear distinction. A colleague in the profession who specializes in these two types of "negative" emotions explains the difference. He says, "anger is goal-directed; rage is threat-directed."
This means an "angry person" wants something specific. The "raging individual" believes he or she is threatened and is trying to relieve that feeling.
Rage is fascinating. The medical practitioner says a raging person "feels like the rage is happening without his or her consent." "They sometimes lose conscious awareness of their activity; they can have so-called rage blackouts that could last from seconds to hours," he adds.
"This does not happen in anger," the good doctor points out.
It can be presumed that the hostage-taker in Luneta may have gone into a fit of rage. He may have felt a "serious threat to his physical survival" which may have ignited a rage blackout.
The day after that tragic incident, local and international broadcast networks showed footages of Hong Kong leaders and residents demonstrating outside of the Philippine consulate in Hong Kong.
They were speaking in agitated tone. Shouting, even. Their faces betrayed the fact that they were aghast.
They were angry. They were not raging. Their emotion was goal-directed: they wanted explanations.
They wanted to know how the incident could have happened. More important, they demanded to know what the Philippine government plans to do in the aftermath of the incident.
It may be reasonable to presume that anger can sometimes be productive. Rage, never.
Sometimes, people need to express anger - in healthy and meaningful ways. People who are angry in a "mature" way use the emotion to make a strong assertion and to demand that a wrong be made right.
In rage, one is helpless. In anger, one still has some control over himself.
In the aftermath of the display of rage and anger, the President called for a "day of national mourning."
Friends asked me, how does one mourn? What does "mourning" really mean?
It's probably different things to different people.
But here's how "mourning" is defined within the medical community. It means "a process by which human beings adapt to a loss." Often, that loss is someone near and dear. The medical dictionary says "mourning" is the normal psychological processes that follow the loss of a loved one" and explains that the emotion called "grief" is the hallmark of this state.
Another question friends ask me is this: But I don't "feel" sadness, so how do I mourn?
That is a valid and important question. Many of us may not feel the actual "grief" that the relatives of the victims of the hostage-taking incident may be going through now. But still, we can "mourn."
There are medical practitioners who believe that the so-called forms of "social mourning" are helpful and important. These include gestures such as lighting candles and offering flowers; ceremonies like wakes and burials; prayers and eulogies.
When the President called for a "national day of mourning," he may not have exactly called on the nation to go an orgy of unbridled grief. Technically, he must have called us to a day of "social mourning." Flying flags at half-mast, offering prayers and expressing our condolences with the relatives of the victims are important expressions of this form of "mourning."
There are medical practitioners who actually encourage "mourning." To them, expressing grief is important to the psychological processes that lead to closure.
But here's an important aspect of "mourning."
Experts say that when people "mourn," they are actually trying to "make sense out of" and "find meaning in" their loss.
We may not feel the grief as intensely as the people of Hong Kong.
But we can surely benefit from a time of mourning during which, as a nation, we can "make sense out of" and "understand the meaning" of that useless carnage that happened in our very own backyard. After that, we can soberly take steps to make sure it does not happen again.
If we don't, then we run the risk of witnessing another public display of fatal rage.
The repercussion of the anger of other nations may then exact a price we cannot afford.
