Many of us have mutilated teddy bears. Not pre-mutilated ones (although I do know someone whose rescue efforts have retrieved stuffed animals from the trash). But ones we have mutilated ourselves. Beheaded. Ripped open. Shredded. Unstuffed.

I don’t bring this up because I have mauled one recently. In fact, stuffed animals in general have been a point of contention with me ever since I moved last summer and a dear friend of mine dumped all mine in the trash. "You’re an adult now, Ryn," she said as my heap of lingering memories were hauled away, complete with the arm of Raggedy Ann jutting ramrod straight out the top of the bag.

I bring this up because I was a concert last night where a teddy bear was hurled into the frenzied crowd and promptly devoured. The music, the smoke effects, the pulse of the beat churned the fevered teens into a band of Bacchae. As the energy surged, the teddy bear erupted. Rent apart. His innards exploded like snow over the heads of the dancers, parts of his carcass were hurled on stage. Someone gutted his head and wore its casing it as a hat.

I happen to have had a personal affection for that particular bear. Earlier that evening I had seen him in the ladies room (or perhaps it was a "she" bear, given the location). I remember it well since I even paused to prop it back up against the side of the mirror, saving it from its fate of perhaps tumbling into the leaking sink. And now he was dead.

What surprised me the most about this whole event was, when I brought it up on the way home in the car, I was immediately met with another story of a mutilated teddy bear. This gal had dismembered one, cut off its arms and legs. "It was so distressing," she lamented, claiming to have dissected the bear so it could properly fit as a chew toy in the mouth of her chiuaua.

More mutilated bear evidence crops up readily. One was propped on my friend’s bedroom windowsill. The bear’s arm was in a sling. Victor, one of my bears, sported an eye patch. My cousin’s Dapper Dan had his leg ripped off. The litany surges on.

Why do we do this? Why do we beat up on our bears? The answer seems simple enough -- misdirected angst. We take out our rage in the wrong direction. Even in our heated fury, however, we are not dumb. If we take out our anger on the actual cause, we may get hurt. Even punching a seemingly harmless wall can break your hand. So we target, alas, the poor teddy bear.

Teddy bears have long had a bad rap. It is not because of their name. There was really nothing wrong with President Theodore Roosevelt -- it’s not like the animal is known as the Clinton or the Nixon bear. Teddy bears are innocent. Soft, cuddly. Usually grinning, like those cheery folk who bellow "Good morning" at six a.m. leaving you with the gut-wrenching desire to punch them squarely in the mouth.

Teddy bears can’t bite back. They can’t spew harsh words, hatred or criticism. They can only stand there, like the family dog, waiting for a hug or some attention. Perhaps we should be nicer to these dismal little creatures, not take our wrath out on the benign. It’s always the kindest, gentlest folk who get the shaft, who get the abuse. Think of younger brothers. Let’s make our anger more constructive. We can look the source squarely in the face, confronting it and telling it how we feel (provided we have cooled down first). We can press so hard writing about it on the page that our pen shatters or the notebook rips. Or we can run around the block, spewing our pent-up emotion out of our pores with each bead of sweat. We could also go all-out, and turn our anger into something REALLY constructive -- like energy to mop the kitchen floor.