The nature of fire

Santideva writes the following analogy when describing anger on others:

If inflicting harm on others is the nature of the foolish, then my anger toward them is as inappropriate as it would be toward fire, which has the nature of burning (p.66, No 39)

This passage seems to make sense, but how often does a person really practice the idea? I have a sense that Santideva's view of emotions goes against a common sense view, which I like to describe as something like "you did it first". A person often treats the anger as something that is triggered from someone or something else and keeps looking for the cause in that other person. But where exactly does anger begin, if not from the perceptions and ways that one frames the world? If I am clear about the fact that anger doesn't come from someone else, then I can observe the anger without ever thinking it is caused by someone else. In that sense, I never turn anger into an object or an enemy.
   It seems the nature of consciousness to try to treat everything as a concrete object. One example I come across is when people talk about 'depression' as though it were a kind of thing that enters one's mind and body. If you have never watched the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", it is a kind of fitting example of the thinking where I treat a mental state as a kind of alien invader. Rather than seeing depression as a label for a set of complicated factors or characteristics, I overuse the term depression...at first as a short hand, but then as a kind of catch-all phrase to describe any difficult mental state which involves a heavy or sad impression.
    In a similar way, Santideva is referring to people who make something really important out of what are really just cause and conditions. If a driver cuts another off on the highway and that person becomes angry, the angry person will rarely consider in that moment that many factors would be contributing the other driver's behavior. Instead, that other driver starts to contain the personification of all the things one has rejected, both in oneself and in others. This is a kind of strange magic that the mind does. It endows events or situations with properties and values that don't necessarily belong to the situation at all.
    What Santideva is trying to do in this passage, I believe, is to go back to the original state of things, by comparing people's behavior to the nature of fire. Now, nobody ever blames fire for burning, so why would we blame people for being themselves? Santideva is using a simple example of properties we can all agree on as 'natural', and extending this metaphor to all people. It's interesting that this analogy is incredibly hard to grasp and practice, because the typical attitude between people is to exaggerate or even distort what one perceives as either 'good' or 'bad' qualities. But if I finally accept that people are the result of their previous behaviors, thoughts and decisions, is there any reason not to see them as like the fire that burns? This attitude is a simple and unconditional acknowledgment that there is always a cause for why people behave as they do, and one needs patience to really look upon it.