Illiterate hate mail
I went to sleep watching continuing election results like some sort of news junkie. I’m not really a news junkie, even though I’m a journalist. But I wanted to see who would be leading this country for the next four years.
Now I’m also not interested in sharing my political views on this blog, because there are many other better places to do this. I was very tempted yesterday to say something, but didn’t.
But in my dream last night, I thought that I had. It was brief, and short, and probably said something bad about Bush. Just like, I can’t believe you people re-elected this guy! (As of right now, we haven’t “officially” elected him, but see how well that worked last time.)
So when I woke up in the dream, I woke up to one e-mail showing up.
But when I went to open it, many more started flooding in. When it stopped, there were over 2,000.
I opened the first one. It was nearly illiterate, with bad spelling and even worse grammar, sometimes in all caps, and called me names for not supporting “our president.”
I thought perhaps I’d be able to make a brief response to each person, but then I realized that a) it’d be impossible to do for 2,000 and b) it would just make them madder, because I didn’t think I could be any more civil back to them.
So then I wondered what I should do. If I made a blanket response, would that make them madder still?
It kind of reminds me of a letter that my Trib friend Dan got after he wrote a letter to Voice of the People. It was hard to even read the handwriting, made no sense, and called both him and Kerry evil Satans or something. Maybe this was inspired by that. Without the pleasure of the insane handwriting. The lesson of this story is: don’t tick people off by saying something political. They’re crazy! This person, who wasn’t intelligent enough to make sense, did manage to find Dan’s address is the phone book and send him hate mail (on nice stationery), complete with a picture of Kerry torn from the paper, which this person put horns and a beard on.
Meanwhile in my dream, my dad and I were apparently supposed to be driving some huge truck. It was parked along the side of the road. In real life, I just spent most of last week in a moving truck, but I didn’t have to drive it, mostly because my dad probably wasn’t comfortable with me driving it.
But in my dream, we were trying to figure out how to move this much larger truck. The controls weren’t intuitive, compared to driving a normal vehicles. There were all these dials that you had to use to operate it. My dad didn’t know how everything worked, either. He made me try, and as I was backing up, I almost hit my car, but managed to veer off at the last second. You had to turn the dial to back up, in addition to using pedals on the floor. The brakes didn’t work intuitively, either.
Earlier in the dream, I was in a place like Berrien Springs, the town where I grew up. I was preparing to leave (which I’m sure is just a way of my brain telling me I left home, even though I consider Niles my home), and was surveying town. Town had gotten a lot worse since I’d last been there. Things were decaying, from buildings to the people.
Was trying to find my bicycle, which I intended to ride out of town, when I ran into where my friends Mindie and Adam were supposed to be living.
The building was old, brick, and falling apart. There is junk in the bleak alleyway, like old, broken dolls and wet toilet paper. Mindie is in the window, and wants to give me something. It is a poem to take with me, to remind me of home, along with a crude crayon drawing of a doll.
I am touched by this, and put it in my backpack and prepare to leave.
It seems there are other random things with junk, and perhaps a bit about a college, but I don’t remember much else.
I’ve been lucky so far. No hate mail, not even anyone really disagreeing with me. I guess that’s a happy testament to the fact that no one reads my blog!
I still think I’m dreaming. It’s hard to believe we are here today, looking at a huge win of the popular vote for Bush.
Does a few million really qualify as huge?
I kinda wish that I’m dreaming now, too. And while I’m at it, maybe the last four years was just an unpleasant dream as well.
And I know that no one but my friends and this brood read this blog, so I feel safe. But I’m always paranoid for putting something like that into writing, because you never know what crackpot is going to come along. Or John Ashcroft. Whoops, do I hear some guys banging down my door?
One of my friends wrote an article about a dog breeding farm where most of the dogs burned in a fire, and she got dozens of hatemail letters from dog people all over the country, simply because that article showed up somewhere. People that are rabid about a cause can mobilize very quickly. That said, again, there are plenty of blogs out there that are political, and I’m not worried. I think it was just my mind working overtime over guilt or things it doesn’t like.
It’s the biggest win of the popular vote since FDR, if what I read today is correct. Presidents rarely break the 50% barrier.
Anything to put a positive spin on something that will continue to tick the other half of us off for the next four years! And now, of course, there’s the obligatory talk of healing.
The only reason that this was a over 50 percent vote is that there were no serious third party candidates. Nader was essentially laughed at and stomped on at every opportunity. Liberals inclined to lean toward Nader this time were reminded every where they turned not to vote for Nader, that it could only hurt Kerry.
So it still wasn’t enough.