Published: October 11, 2008 09:33 pm            

Stephanie Salter: I don’t know you, but I hate you because I think I know you

TERRE HAUTE — She did not leave her name or telephone number, only her rage.

Her voicemail came in just before 10 on a weekday morning. It lasted for three minutes and began in a way that would lead anyone who has not written an opinion column for a living to expect a friendly message.

“Hello, Stephanie,” the woman said, “I read your article this morning.”

But her tone tipped me off. It was eerily pleasant, with a sing-song quality you might use as you crept up on an insect you planned to smash.

“I want you to know,” she said, “I think it’s horrible that you’re printing some crap where some guy worked for somebody and said all these ugly things.”

The vehemence that fueled the woman’s words told me her message wasn’t really about me or even the column I’d written, which had included some negative observations about Sarah Palin by one of the Alaska governor’s former employees.

The call was more about something that is starting to define our society — stranger hate.

It is symptomatic of the way too many of us are dealing with each other, a way that is being encouraged across the country by yet another season of vicious and mendacious political campaigning that’s meant to divide us more deeply and inspire us to reduce many of our fellow citizens to vermin.

And when I say “us,” I mean “us.” Right, Left, In Between. We all do it, to some degree or another.

In fact, for people who talk so much about God and Jesus, we Americans are harboring awfully hard hearts these days. Increasingly, those hearts are filled with judgment, condemnation and self-righteousness.

Rather than disagree, we despise. Worse, we take every transgression or thoughtless slight personally, especially when we don’t know the transgressor.

This helps us perceive ourselves as perpetual victims, wounded and wronged by almost everything we encounter, from people of other faiths to under-trained sales clerks to the price of natural gas.

To sustain our victim mentality — and to stay angry about it — we have to assume much and fill in many blanks. We have to create whole scenarios (past, present and future) based on the tiny shard of information that initially poked us to attention.

The reader who left her angry phone message assumed a great deal about me (mostly wrong) that helped her create a future scenario that would balance her scales of justice.

My destiny: After Barack Obama bankrupts the nation, and it is taken over by a foreign power, she said, I will end up as “a human female slave, probably a sex slave.” At the very least, I’ll lose my journalism job and find myself “cleaning toilets.”

Wild as the caller’s end-logic was, her thought process wasn’t all that unique. She just chose to reveal it via voicemail rather than do what most of us do — keep the anger to ourselves for further scab picking and seething.

The column that set off the caller was about a friend who worked for more than a year as an aide to Palin. His proximity to the governor, his informed opinion that she is not qualified to be vice president — and his willingness to speak on the record — have made him a busy news media guest. Most of the piece was about him, not Palin.

But that ratio was lost on the angry caller, as were the particulars of my actual existence. These are some of the things she had to assume to make me deserving of sex slavery and cleaning toilets:

That I am a young person who thinks “people are going to give you everything for nothing. You don’t want to pay your bills. You don’t want to do anything.”

That I am a misogynist — “I think Sarah Palin is just as good as anybody that runs for vice president or for president. And if you want to put women down, you just go ahead, lady.”

The caller told me she was in her early 70s and “many years ago” had voted Republican because “the Republicans were for women and blacks. I’m a white woman, so I voted for a Republican because it was for women.”

She said she had “worked on women’s rights,” therefore “when I see this crap you young women are printing, I think you should be taken and smacked on the ass.”

Before signing off she said, “We need somebody that runs this country with decency and that protects this nation, not giving it away to every liberal butthead or giving it away to other countries.”

Those of you thinking this was just a crazy rant — it wasn’t. Believe me, I know crazy rants when I hear them, and they rarely arrive at 10 a.m.

This voicemail was the howl of a person carrying decades of real and imagined wounds, decades of disappointment and disillusionment that have caused her to judge and condemn on sight (or sound) and to divide the world into the decent and the buttheads.

Thanks to the hate meisters of TV, radio, politics and sometimes the pulpit, those wounds and disappointments have become a badge of belonging for people like her. That badge entitles them — no, obligates them — to perceive even legitimate criticism of a favored public official as an attack on their very own private selves.

As the attacker then, I was naturally wished a nasty future. A taxpayer and home owner with good credit, a year from my 60th birthday and a feminist for 40 of those years, I nonetheless warrant sex slavery and toilets because the angry caller pegged me as a young deadbeat who likes to put down my own gender.

Whenever I listen to a phone message like the angry woman’s this week, I try to imagine myself as the person standing there, finally hanging up.

After all, many times my lesser angels have tried to persuade me to deliver such an anonymous thrashing.

Usually, I picture someone who is purged and a little high on adrenaline, but who doesn’t feel nearly as good as you’d expect to feel after getting such a load off your chest. Always, I wonder how much of the message would have been delivered if the target of rage had answered the phone and the caller had been forced to deal with a living being on the other end instead of a projection of her own fear and resentment.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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