Yet we have faced bigger problems before, and have surmounted periods of angrier strife with decency, determination and doses of flag-waving patriotism.
Legends we read for their timelessness and to understand the world and its complexities, ancient and modern: angry gods, fearless heroes, family strife, the female athlete, men and women, and no less the epic combat between humans and animals, their common destiny, and their close evolutionary and spiritual connection.
Two years ago, in an interview with the Guardian, Blige hissed that her family - long a source of strife in her life - were "angry, hateful, jealous, ignorant, prideful people".
But it is just the sort of strife-torn place, full of alienated, angry Muslims, where those seeking to organise jihad find fertile ground.
O. Scott) 'Another Happy Day' (R, 1 55) The mighty Ellens — Barkin and Burstyn — chew the scenery in this strident wedding melodrama, in which generational and marital factions of a strife-torn family collide and grind out angry sparks.
The all-powerful leader who couldn't quite read the writing on the wall, the angry leader who kept trying military solutions to ease sectarian strife?
Yet neither a repetition of that revolutionary precedent nor a decline into wider civil strife appears likely just now.This time, again, an angry crowd gathered in Beirut's Martyrs' Square for the emotional funeral of Brigadier-General Wissam Hassan, who as the quietly efficient head of Lebanon's equivalent of the FBI had been seen as a champion of Sunni interests within the Lebanese state.
The timing of the execution, as thousands of angry Coptic Christians in Cairo prepared to bury those killed the night before, recalled what human rights activists had long described as a pattern by the Mubarak government of using its criminal justice system to placate Egyptians angry over episodes of sectarian strife, often without an open investigation or an airing of the facts.
But the strife has continued.
