Anatomy of The Union's letter-writers - "The Analyst...the comedian...the bewildered...the bomb-thrower..."
it's pretty good. especially this, which seems far stronger than anything The Union has dared to publish in the past:
We try to screen out the personal attacks and the bloodthirsty language - not to "censor," as some of them charge, but because that's not the kind of opinion page we want in The Union. If you allow too much of that behavior, then the page becomes a freak show instead of a community forum.
However, a freak show is what some readers would like to see. One writer said he gets pumped up when, walking down the street after writing a particularly vicious broadside, his friends high-five him for enraging his political or social enemies.
Unfortunately, sometimes this angry behavior doesn't stop with letters. I was dismayed to hear from a person who had written a well-reasoned letter to the editor about a local issue, then received a threatening, anonymous note in the mail.
Fear of things like this undoubtedly keeps many from writing letters or Other Voices guest columns...
Also Anger Management:
and, once they got there, set to work driving off and killing the indigenous residents...
...it set me to thinking about the nature of the angry personality - what fosters it, and what outlets it uses.
...
The recent story we told about one Grass Valley editor caning another back in the 1860s led me to another theory: that the origin of anger here goes back to the independent, "I want mine" nature of those 49ers who stampeded to the gold fields.
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