At the outset, I’d like to be very clear about one thing: Anger in itself is not harmful. Everything has its place. No emotion is “useless” or “bad”. Many people who wish to be “good people” or those who consider themselves to be spiritual hold the incorrect notion that anger is bad, and that they should always be peaceful or in a good mood. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we are not authentic about how we feel in the moment, we become fake people, unable to use the energy of emotion for anything. It stagnates inside of us, and eventually expresses itself as physical or mental disease. Those who pretend to be peaceful and happy all the time are not being authentic.
If we see someone hurting an innocent person, of course we should be angry about it and try to stop them if we can. Many terrible things take place in human society, and unless we feel angry about them and oppose them, they are not going to change. We have to be careful though, about not getting addicted to being angry or antagonistic. Many people fall into this trap. The idea of ‘strongly opposing’ things becomes an ingrained habit. They simply go about being angry at many things, but do not really do anything of any consequence. The result is that they end up feeling frustrated and they simply become ineffective, angry people.
Let us look at the life of Mahatma Gandhi. He was very, very angry with the way he was treated in South Africa. He was thrown out of a first class compartment despite having purchased a ticket, simply because of the colour of his skin. But rather than explode with that anger, he kept it inside, simmering away like red hot coals, and used the energy of that anger to start the independence movement in India. He decided not to resort to violence (who knows what terrible things that path of expressing anger could have resulted in), but instead, he decided to not co-operate with the British in the running of the administration, and to protest peacefully. It takes a lot of fire and conviction to be able to not raise a hand on someone who is attacking innocent people mercilessly. But his conviction about what was right, and the decision to stick by his chosen non-violent way of expressing anger paid dividends in the end: today, more than a billion people owe their freedom to the choice made by this one man.
So yes, it is quite okay to be angry, and to let it out in positive ways! Anger has the energy of a rocket, and can get us to places quickly where “being calm and peaceful” can never get us in a thousand years. The trick, then, is to use everything as a tool for progress: including strong emotions like anger.