The Mast-Head: Messages of Hate

There were two messages on my voice mail when I got to the office last Thursday morning. Both were in response to an editorial on Republican voter suppression in advance of the midterm elections. 

One caller was calm; the other started off angry and ended more than a minute later stutteringly furious. (I shared the audio on several of my social media accounts.) 

Aside from their common rejection of what The Star had published that morning, the callers, women who did not leave their names, were linked in apparently misunderstanding what editorials are. 

The calm woman’s message concerned the absence of a byline (editorials, which reflect the views of a publication’s owners, are rarely signed, whether at The Times, The Wall Street Journal, or the local papers). 

The crescendo of the angry call came when the woman shrieked, “It’s all opinions!” She went on to accuse us of threatening United States sovereignty and being the main cause of East Hampton’s downfall, whatever that may be. 

The two phoned reactions came a day before Cesar Sayoc’s arrest in Florida for allegedly sending 14 pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Trump. And they came two days before a shooting attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 people. 

On Thursday, when I first heard them, the messages were amusing. By Saturday afternoon, they had taken on a far darker note. Particularly in the angry woman’s voice, I could hear the irrational hostility that might have motivated these most recent attackers. 

Hatred is a powerful thing. The president floated on a bilious cloud of it all the way to the White House, and has pinned his survival in the midterms on it. Of all the elections since perhaps the Nixon-McGovern presidential race, this one has most clearly pitted hate against its opposite — love. Voting is essential; it may literally be a matter of life and death.