This is what the human world is like. There are going to be people who do things & say things that are displeasing to you, to the people who love, or pleasing to the people you hate. It’s got to be this way.

"We’ve often found in the past that we get our way by being angry, but when we stop and look at it, we’re also creating a lot of kamma for ourselves, a lot of bad kamma. We have to stop and think for a while: Anger is not the positive thing we think is. We sometimes we say that injustice wouldn’t be fought without that anger. Well, it can be fought without anger. In fact, it’s most effectively fought without anger. If we’ve been the victims of injustice, we don’t like to think that we’ve somehow been complicit in it. But that’s what the four noble truths are pointing us to: the suffering we create for ourselves. That’s the issue. The suffering coming from outside was not the main issue. It is an issue, but because we pile on our own suffering inside, we make it more and more difficult to deal properly with the outside stuff.

So straightening out our own mind is not a question of laying the blame on us. It’s just saying that if we can’t take care of this issue inside, we won’t be able to take care of issues outside. This has to come first.

After all, look at what happens through anger. There’s a great passage where the Buddha says that when a person is angry, he does things and says things and thinks things that his enemy would be pleased to see happen. You look ugly, you drive away your friends, you harm your own well-being. Black seems white, white seems black, everything gets mixed up. What you think you’re doing to put yourself in a good position actually puts you in a bad position, and vice versa. You destroy your good reputation. All these things are things that an enemy would find pleasing.

This line of thinking was the Buddha’s first line of defense against anger. He doesn’t teach you to love your enemy at that point. Instead, he asks, do you really want to please your enemy by acting in this way? That brings you up short. Then he has you step back and just look at the situation in terms of the laws of kamma and action: Do you really do want to do something unskillful right now? Can you see clearly right now that anger clouds your vision?

The problem is often that, under the influence of anger, you seem to see so clearly what should be said, what should be done. That’s because you’ve narrowed the range of your attention. Your mind has been tunneled, so you can see only one thing that seems the obvious thing to be done, the obvious thing to be said. That’s because you blocked off all your sense of shame, all your sense of concern for the results of your actions.

So as you step back and look for a while, look in terms of the teaching on kamma. Remember that you’re a human being, and this is what the human world is like. There are going to be people who do things and say things that are displeasing to you, displeasing to people who love, or pleasing the people you hate. This is the nature of the world. It’s got to be this way. If you let that put you into an unskillful mental state, you’re at a disadvantage."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Unskillful Habits"