Mail stamped with hatred

How to cope with the viciousness of hate mail? Consider it therapy for the bitter, unsuccessful correspondents who send it - and pity them.

COLUMN GOSIER E-mail: Click here Archive

By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 12, 2001

As we frequently do, my colleague from the land of group-think, Bill Maxwell, and I were having a chuckle over the morning's issue of hate mail.

He showed me his and I showed him mine. Mine was unopened but recognizable from the familiar scrawl.

"I would like to meet one of these guys," said Bill, who admits -- no, proudly proclaims -- that he is not a nice guy. He flicked his open palm rapidly back and forth in a slapping motion to indicate how the conversation would go.

I didn't share Bill's desire to meet any of our fans, or to have that same conversation with them. I suspect I already have met many of them and have little to learn from additional encounters. They are bitter old men simmering in their own failure, desperately needing someone to blame for it. They are objects of pity, not anger or enlightenment.

Yes, I'm guilty of profiling. Some of them may actually be women, some young. And even though some of them occasionally use the letterheads of reputable businesses, I suspect that is a ruse, something they picked up as they passed through someone else's office. It is hard to imagine that anyone with the time or the inclination -- especially the inclination -- to devote so much effort to mailing garbage regularly has sense enough to be in charge of anything.

I'm not naive enough to think there aren't people with the same attitudes and hatred who are running departments, even businesses. That is why you see little diversity in their offices. They don't have to express their resentments in the mail; they take it out on the black folks, or whatever group they target, who seek to work for them. They affirm their silly notions of superiority by not hiring them or by hiring only those who fit their stereotypes and only for the most menial positions.

The hate-mail addicts, on the other hand, don't have the power to discriminate against anyone. That is a major source of their festering hate and frustration. In a land where advantage and privilege are theirs, they have failed. They have spent their lives at the same job and barely advanced, perhaps to foreman of a work crew. They did not accumulate wealth and retired on a pension that's just enough for survival.

They cannot accept that their shortfall was due to their shortcomings. They can't accept that they were not smart enough or talented enough to move on the same track they saw others take. To acknowledge their own inadequacies would lead to self-loathing, self-hatred. They need a scapegoat. Black folks are still America's most convenient bogey man.

So they blame their failure on black folks, or foreigners. They didn't get promoted because they had to give the job to a member of a minority. Say it enough and it becomes believable, especially when you need to believe it to maintain some semblance of self worth.

It is said so often and believed by so many that were it true in each instance, every black person in America would be a supervisor or manager. That contradicts another set of beliefs that all black folks are selling drugs, hanging out on street corners, lurking somewhere for the opportunity to snatch a white woman's purse or rape her, or living the good life in prison.

So they get back at black folks who have deprived them of their God-given right to succeed by getting up a couple of mornings a week and mailing their venom to those black guys at the newspaper.

Most of the time their letters go unread. Sometimes, because the handwriting has become recognizable, it goes unopened from mailbox to trash can. Sometimes it goes to our diversity trainers to help them show their students how screwed up some people are.

Sometimes, on slow mornings, it gives those two black guys at the paper something to laugh about. But, unlike my buddy Bill, I am a nice guy, and sometimes, after I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes, I feel sorry for the composers of those letters. I try to imagine the misery of having a life so empty that it revolves around something so meaningless as sending letters to people you don't know. I try to imagine the misery of a life so consumed by hate and resentment that the time required to compose and mail them is not seen as wasted.

Such a waste of human life saddens me, so much so that I have copied a chapter from the hate mailers. I have constructed my own set of rationalizations to make my pity of them bearable.

I tell myself I'm therapy for them. So long as they're expending so much effort to vent their frustrations and anger to me, they probably don't have enough energy left for more destructive expressions.

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