?#*)!BLEEP #@%!

By TAD BARTIMUS

Mostly I get funny, poignant and warm letters from readers who want to share their own stories or take issue with mine. Men and women, in nearly equal numbers, use everything from frilly, scented stationery to heavy engraved bond to express their thoughts. E-mails abound. I welcome letters and, until a few weeks ago, answered all of them.

Then a column about my resistance to expensive -- and in my view unjustified -- medical tests triggered an avalanche of mail, some of which began: "Dear Idiot," "Tad, you are a slut..." "Dear Columnist, you are full of (expletive deleted)," "What a ----- (rhymes with witch) you are!"

Whoa, Mama! I have no way of knowing anything about many of the correspondents because they sent unsigned letters with no return address. But the aggressive in-your-face attitude that prompts somebody to fill an envelope with complete ill will has to come from folks who spend a lot of time being angry.

Negative mail goes with the territory. But the sheer vitriol of many of these letters set me to thinking hard about intolerance and the way it is shrinking civil discourse in this country.

We Americans have always operated under the premise – and often the illusion --- that we are intellectually generous enough to let our neighbors "live and let live" as long as they don't infringe on our own rights. We celebrate this founding tenet every Thanksgiving when we recall the Pilgrims' journey here in search of religious freedom, every Fourth of July when we reflect on democratic ideals. We have legal separation of church and state, anti-discrimination laws and the luxury of mobility in an open society.

Yet hate crimes make headlines every day, from a barbed wire fence near Laramie, Wyoming, to a Fort Worth, Texas, Baptist church; from an L.A Jewish Community Center to -- well, quite possibly, coming to your town soon. The root of hate is ignorance and fear of others who are "different" from the hater. Even in our everyday life we encounter pushy people who want to hammer away at our attitudes and beliefs until we "see the light."

Since most of us try and avoid pointless arguing, we either clam up or avoid such encounters. But sometimes we're trapped, like I was recently when two business colleagues took me to dinner, then got into an argument over which entrŽe I should order. They wound up quizzing the waiter like two trial lawyers interrogating a hapless witness as each tried to out-maneuver the other. In the end I got food I didn't like and a bad case of indigestion.

That once-clear line between personal entitlement and insulting intimidation of somebody who disagrees with us has been smudged, maybe permanently, through this erosion of common courtesy and respect for different views. Institutional hand-wringing won't stem the spread of the "Me First, My Views Right or Wrong" attitude that's all around us. But as every kindergartner is taught, acts that demean or harm others reveal more about the perpetrator than the victim. The connecting thread between rudeness and violence is disregard for the Golden Rule. That's not religious dogma, it's simply common sense. If you do it to somebody else, they can do it back to you.

Until we bring the Golden Rule back into vogue, we must make do by blessing the inventors of the MUTE button and the DELETE key. It's more of that personal responsibility thing -- use them to get rid of folks with bad attitudes.

From now on, letters that obscenely insult or threaten me will go straight into the BLEEPING trash, where they belong.

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