If you’re a blogger, you get some hate mail. If you’re a waiter and you spill food on someone, you may very well get yelled at. If you’re an athlete, at any level, you’ll probably get jeered and booed when you play in an opposing stadium or arena. Go for a drive, somebody might well cut you off, give you the finger, and yell obscenities. You have to look far and wide to find somone who doesn’t feel that they’ve been subject to some inappropriate and unnecessary expressions of anger in the not-too-distant past; but coping with being the focus of someone else’s ill temper is more or less now part of daily life in this country.
It would be nice if we lived in a politer, more civil, more gracious, and less angry world, but this is not exactly a new or sudden phenomenon.
But members of Congress? Apparently, they can’t take it:
Members of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation are under fire today from the editorial pages of the conservative New Hampshire Union Leader and the liberal Portsmouth Herald. At issue is the fact that the Granite State’s representatives, specifically Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Reps. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter, are not holding town hall meetings on health care reform with their constituents this August recess but instead partying with liberal bloggers and holding a smattering of so-called tele-town hall meetings—essentially controlled conference calls in which constituents are tellingly kept on “listen only mode.”
I’m reminded of one of Dennis Miller’s lines: “Life is tough. Wear a cup.”
UPDATE: Shea-Porter’s concept of persuasion: “”Find those tea-baggers who don’t like the idea of this and talk to them.”
Yes, nothing relaxes the defenses of a skeptic better than an off-color nickname.