Outrageous Outrage

I have been outraged three times today, and it's barely 10:00 AM.  None of these outrages actually involved any personal affront or even a traffic situation.  It was simply the course of reading the news.  I am at the point where I know which news outlets to flat out avoid.  I try to digest things with an understanding of different perspectives, and I try to avoid things that I know are blatant fear mongering.  However, when you run across a well written, in depth article from a trustworthy and generally non-biased source, and it still makes you want to spit hot nails...
I'm not even going into what my three morning outrages are, they all involve politics and quite frankly, I'm all outraged out.
I would like to reflect on the feeling that I have about the relative healthiness of all this outrage.  I feel like it can't be good for me, or for anyone really.  The thing is though, outrage is sort of like donuts. As much as you try to avoid it, as much as you refuse to go out of your way to go to Dunkin' Donuts, from time to time they're just going to show up at a meeting or somewhere you have to be, and they're there, glistening at you, and I just don't have the emotional resources to resist that sort of temptation.
I know I can get my outrage fix anytime by going to Fox News or MSNBC, I can got either left or right to find something that will enrage me.  So I try to go for trustworthy sources only, this usually means traditional media sources like the NY Times or the Washington Post, which are now well established and accessible online.  This morning though, two of my three outrages came via the bastion of boring moderation that is Bill Moyers, he's practically Jim Lehrer for the love of Cronkite.  Great googly-moogly, this is PBS territory, this old time actual journalism.  And the things, which I'm still not going to go on about, were pretty well investigated and detailed reports, not click bait.
But outraged I was, and am, and I'm feeling a little like this is only going to get worse from here on out, because the things that I find so outrageous are not easily fixed, and maybe cannot be fixed at all. They are tied into the confluence of money and power and that, unfortunately seems to be the way it is and was and ever shall be, world with out end. Amen.
The outrage inside me, which sounds like Lewis Black in case you need an audio aid, is saying that this is not okay.  The outrage says that accepting this degradation of human society as unavoidable or inevitable is a horrible cop out, and probably precisely what the robber barons and super-thieves are banking on.  I'm going to vote, I'm going to vote with my outrage and I'm going to try to transmute that outrage into hope instead of despair, but until then, I want some other actions to take.  But what?  What to do about the stew of genuinely outrageous things that confront us every day, whether it's some political boondoggle, some economic hornswoggle, or the latest mass shooting (which has no pithy colloquialism to describe it, thanks be).
That is, for me where the spiritual struggle kicks in, because the path to battling outrage begins with me, the same place that the struggle to eat healthy does.  Back to that outrage: donuts analogy.  Junk food is easy and fast and readily available, as is outrage.  Healthy eating requires preparation and planning and education.  Checking the available information, seeing if it's too high in fat or sodium, seeing how many calories you're actually shoveling down your gullet.  It gets tedious and sometimes it's downright impossible, but there really aren't any shortcuts.  And there are times that your willpower is going to flat out fail you, and that boston creme donut is going in no matter what.
I honestly don't think I can avoid being outraged about the way things are right now, but that means I need to make wiser and more conscientious decisions in other areas.  I'm going to need to consume less junk, stay away from the slanted and biased, which are presented in gluttonous amounts.  I need to eat a healthy balance from reliable sources and make sure I don't neglect viewpoints that differ from my own (veggies), make sure I get enough solid facts (protein), and make sure also that I read enough hopeful things to sustain my energy (good carbs) for the inevitable injustice, violence and greed that will pollute my diet eventually.
I have the feeling that it's going to be a long year.