WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE MAD THAT YOU FEEL?

An exposé in memory of Fred Rogers

Aug 03, 2025

There is a particular kind of fury that doesn’t scream. It doesn’t throw punches or slam doors. It doesn’t make headlines or hashtags. It settles in the chest like a weight, like a quiet betrayal, like hearing your childhood home has been sold to strangers and torn down while you were sleeping. That’s the kind of anger many of us felt when we learned that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is being shut down. No more federal funding for PBS, for NPR, for the patchwork quilt of local stations that stitched this country together not with commercials or algorithms, but with music, memory, and the radical act of giving a damn. It was a knife through the heart of the quiet, the curious, the compassionate. And it didn’t come with an apology. It came with a smirk.

We are told we are overreacting. That it's just television. That the world has moved on. That Big Bird and Arthur and Mister Rogers were quaint artifacts from a simpler time. But the people saying that never needed Mister Rogers to teach them how to process a parent’s divorce. They never relied on PBS to fill in the gaps left by overcrowded classrooms or overworked parents. They never watched a soft-spoken man in a sweater tell them, for the first time in their lives, that they mattered. Fred Rogers didn’t just host a children’s show — he intervened in the emotional formation of a nation, one child at a time. He looked into the camera and said, “You are loved. Not for what you do, not for what you own, not for who you pretend to be — but simply because you are you.” If you think that’s disposable, then you’ve already forgotten what it means to be human.

When Rogers stood before Congress in 1969, he didn’t demand. He didn’t perform. He sat calmly before a skeptical, impatient Senate and changed their minds with one quiet, devastating truth: children are not passive consumers — they are feeling, forming, becoming. He spoke of anger. Not to suppress it, but to honor it. He recited a song, born from the question of a child who didn’t know what to do with his own rage. Rogers knew that what we do with anger is what defines us. Not whether we feel it — but how we answer it.

“What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag
Or see how fast you go?
It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead…”

That question matters more now than ever. Because we are living in a moment where decency is defunded, compassion is mocked, and truth is buried beneath outrage and noise. The people who shut down public broadcasting weren’t cutting waste — they were cutting the wires between neighbor and neighbor, child and teacher, story and soul. They weren’t balancing a budget. They were tipping the scales against empathy. And for those of us who remember what this country sounded like when it still cared to listen, the silence left behind is deafening.

So what do we do with the mad that we feel? We don’t bottle it up. We don’t burn it down. We breathe it in and we turn it into something enduring. We teach. We protect. We fund what they won’t. We rebuild our own neighborhood, brick by brick, screen by screen, story by story. And when they ask us why we’re still fighting for shows with puppets and pianos and public funding, we will say: because those things taught us how to be kind. And kindness, when practiced with intention and clarity and courage, is one of the most dangerous things you can teach a child — because it makes them ungovernable by cruelty.

Fred Rogers never raised his voice. He didn’t have to. He raised a generation. He taught us how to feel without fear, how to speak without shouting, how to love without permission. And if the people in power today think they can erase that with a line item in a budget proposal, they are mistaken. You can cut the signal, but you cannot cut the memory. You cannot legislate away the voice that told us, in our loneliest moments, “You’ve made this day a special day, just by being you.” And that voice is still here. Inside every one of us who listened. Inside every one of us who is ready now to answer the question not with despair, but with action.