Sometimes I can tell when an article is going to make people angry.
So it was last week, when the Gazette ran a series of articles, some of which I wrote, looking at local immigration trends. I knew these stories would make people angry, because immigration is sort of a hot button issue right now, and people get angry when you write about hot button issues. In general, I don’t set out to make people angry, but I don’t really care if I do, either, as I’ve been writing things that make people angry since high school, and people are not going to shun me when I go to my locker, which is what they did in high school, or organize a campus-wide protest, which was always a possibility in college. These days, feedback from angry readers usually comes in the form of angry e-mails, and they’re a lot easier to deal with.
When I arrived at work Monday, my inbox was full of angry messages, just as I suspected it would be, but these angry messages were unlike any I’d ever received before. Most of them suggested that I wasn’t really an American — “How does it feel to be a modern-day Tokyo Rose?” asked one student of history, in a message that sent me scrambling to Wikipedia to learn more about Tokyo Rose, who I’ve concluded I don’t really have all that much in common with — and that in writing these stories I had betrayed my country. Of course, I found it impossible to take any of this seriously, since being accused of ruining the world didn’t seem all that different from being accused of ruining the morale at my high school, though perhaps I should start wearing a flag pin on my lapel, just to appear more American-like. “What is a real American, anyway?” I wondered, before deciding that this is exactly the sort of question that keeps the discourse in this country at a playground level, and opting just to follow my mom’s old advice about ignoring the mean kids at school. After all, my varsity letter jacket never made anyone think I had a lot of school spirit.
The angry e-mails also suggested that I would soon be unemployed, because an immigrant with a H1B visa would arrive to take my job at the Gazette, and these e-mails marked the first time angry readers have exulted in my future unemployment. “Pretty darn soon you too will be out of job,” one person wrote. “Newspapers are failing across the country. Maybe that’s what it will take to get across to you morons who can’t see beyond the end of your nose. Your repeated efforts to undermine your own country and fellow citizens is disgraceful. You don’t mind giving your own job away to foreigners ... do you? See you in the breadlines Sister!” This may be the funniest angry e-mail I’ve ever received, and since I have an annoying habit of repeating certain phrases and expressions over and over again until I get sick of them (just a few months ago I couldn’t stop saying, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” but that’s a story for another day) I keep turning to my co-workers and saying, “See you in the breadlines, sister!” I’m sure it’s getting pretty annoying, but I just can’t stop myself.
Still, this message, more than the others, tapped into my basic fear, one shared by journalists throughout the country, that my newspaper is about to fold or lay me off, and that I’ll soon be standing in a breadline somewhere. And since I hate it when someone else gets the last laugh, I hope that never happens. Not that I’m too worried about running into the angry e-mailers while standing in the breadline, because it’s pretty clear that most of them don’t live around here, and that these stories were distributed widely on-line by anti-immigration groups. The first angry letter we printed in the paper came not from Schenectady or Guilderland or Cobleskill, but from Arlington, Va.
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about how a local group that assists immigrants and refugees was sponsoring classes designed to familiarize their clients with American laws, and this resulted in an angry call from someone who threw around words like bias and agenda. “Do you have some sort of animosity toward immigrants?” this person demanded, and of course it’s enough to make your head spin, being accused of hating immigrants one week and hating America the next. I shrugged off most of this woman’s criticisms, but then she suggested that I was a bad writer, and you know what? That’s the one thing that really got under my skin, because we writers are a vain and sensitive lot, and it doesn’t take much to convince me that everything I’ve ever written is complete crap. But accuse me of hating America? Well, that’s just so absurd that it doesn’t bother me at all.
