Allen Johnson: An unsigned letter to a reader was unkind, unwise and unsettling

To whom it may concern:

I don't know who you are but you do.

You're the anonymous bully who stuffed a venomous, unsigned letter in a local woman's mailbox.

She had written a letter to the editor about the presidential election that you obviously didn't like.

That's not unusual. People disagree about politics, sometimes strenuously, especially in this day and age.

They write rebuttal letters. They comment online.

But very rarely do they go to the trouble of tracing someone's address and hand-delivering a threatening response.

Like you did days before the election.

Your letter dripped with anger and contempt.

You said you hoped that Donald Trump would put Democrats in gas chambers.

The person who received those words happened to be a 90-year-old woman.

Her son wrote a letter to us last week about the incident.

It may have made you feel smaller and ashamed of what you did. It may not have.

In any case, nobody should get a letter like yours, regardless of his or her gender or age or political persuasion.

And you shouldn't be writing one.

Now that you've had some time to reflect on it, I hope you've had second thoughts.

Maybe you acted in the heat of the moment. Maybe you were having a bad day. Maybe you were blinded by the passion of your beliefs.

Maybe, if you had the chance to relive that moment, you'd have taken a match to that letter. Or you wouldn't have written it at all.

After all, there are limits to your right to free speech. You can get into deep trouble with the law for the kind of thing you did.

Your letter recalls an anonymous online commenter who once quipped about blowing up the International Civil Rights Center & Museum. Turns out he was joking. But the State Bureau of Investigation wasn't.

In the end, he wasn't arrested, but he certainly was shaken by the experience.

So, I wouldn't do this anymore if I were you.

There are other options. It's why we have letters to the editor ... to provide a safe space to agree or disagree, often vigorously, but with at least some degree of respect and civility.

You should try writing us one.

Of course, you'll have to leave out the racist rhetoric. You'll also need to provide your name, address and phone number.

Your name is published in the paper. We don't do anonymous here. But the address and phone number are for our eyes only and are used only to authenticate your identity as well as to contact you if we have questions.

Speaking of questions, I have a few:

What we you seeking to accomplish by delivering your letter?

Did you believe it would convert its recipient to your way of thinking?

Did you envision her suddenly slapping her forehead and saying: "Gee, that foul-mouthed person is as cordial as a rattlesnake, but he makes a very good argument. By golly, I'm going to vote for his guy after all."

Or did you aim to scare and intimidate her, the point of which would be ... well, what?

If your argument is as sound as you obviously think it is, why not make it above-board in the light of day, not with an unsigned letter you slip into someone's mailbox in the cover of darkness?

Fortunately, actions like yours are the exception and not the rule.

Several years ago, some letter writers received boilerplate responses from the same person, mailed from a fake address. They were bad, but not as overt as yours.

And several years before that a few letter writers received phone calls that were neither anonymous nor threatening. The callers just wanted to convince them they were wrong.

That's not appropriate either.

When I write something you'd like to react to, you're welcome to call. It's my job.

I've had my own brushes with incivility, including a letter containing a clipping of one of my columns smeared with excrement.

It didn't make my day but sometimes those kinds of things happen when your name, address, photo and phone number are in the paper.

Not so with our letter writers. They're off-limits except in other letters.

As for my purpose in writing, I guess it's in the hope you'll at least think about what you did.

What if someone hand-delivered an unsigned letter to your wife or mother and some other loved one?

How would you feel?

Bottom line: We welcome different points of view in our newspaper, yours included.

We only ask that you disagree without being disagreeable.

And that you at least have the courage to say who you are.

Executive Editorial Page Editor