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Show .Angry voices in the night Some of us lead too-sheltered lives. We listen to chamber music late at night when we should be lending an ear to our countrymen and there must be millions of them whose idea of political protest is telephoning a radio or TV show and delivering an urgent message to the world. Often of late the message begins, "Somebody should tell the president..." Teh him what? Tell him the peace marchers are all in the pay of the commies and they should be sent im-. im-. mediately to Russia, preferably strapped strap-ped to a missile. Tell the president he did a good thing for America when he kept the press out of the Grenada invasion. in-vasion. Tell him and I may exaggerate here, but not much tell him he is holy, wise and just, and should be president forever. Some of the callers are very old, and a few, I suspect, are dead. They are angry people who hurt inside, and sending sen-ding up these verbal flares somehow eases the hurt. At least I hope it does. My instinct, when I work late at night, is to set the dial to some spot offering of-fering a soft, steady flow of music . But when my sinews want stiffening, when I need to recover the sense of mission we wretched scribes are in danger of losing, then I listen to those wild sounds in the night at the nether ends of the ether. Invariably, the sentiments expressed ex-pressed go counter to my every cherished belief. Sometimes I'm nonplussed. non-plussed. I wonder about these callers with the tearing edge to their voices. Why are they so sour with suspicion? Why do they so despise the poor? "I've worked hard all my life," they keep saying. "Nobody ever gave me handouts..." hand-outs..." Nothing, they are confessing, has ever come to us with grace or ease. The poor, now, they've got it all too easy. Living off the taxpayers. Buying booze with food stamps. "Tell the president..." Listening with the heart, you can hear the anxiety, the rage, in those voices. Ah, but listen with the head and you note that the facts are wrong often of-ten wildly so and the judgments woolly. A sense of history is sadly lacking. Last week I heard a down-home voice from Oklahoma tell a patient TV newsman (by telephone) that, "We've got to get rid of the Democrats in Congress." All of them? Yes. After the party line closes for the night, after the sweet music returns, it's easy to forget the anger and frustration of the callers. What one remembers is their pride. Fierce, red, white and blue pride. They may live in a shabby house on a mean, dark street but, by God, they're part of the greatest country on earth. And some days you sense oh, the pity of it that the only source of self-esteem in their lives is proclaiming that fact, preferably over the airwaves. It used to puzzle me that moderate voices were so rarely heard on the call-in call-in shows. I said as much to a friend, who responded, "Why don't you call in some night?" "Oh, no, I couldn't." And it's true, though I was hard put to explain why at the moment. The problem is that the call-in crowd is hot for certainties. They don't want their opinions challenged, their prejudices upset. We are a polarized nation today, each side believing it has a monopoly on truth. Moderates and liberals have never been more suspect. They criticize. They want the government to be wiser, more open, more compassionate. They wish the president weren't so belligerent. They wish Caspar Weinberger Wein-berger would go the way of James Watt. They wish the White House understood un-derstood the uses of diplomacy. Thinking about those angry voices in the night, another troubling thought arises. The callers all seem to know, by instinct, where President Reagan stands, even on questions where he has been duplicitous in the name of politics (i.e., a holiday honoring Martin Luther King). They know because their prejudices coincide with his. Some of us find that scary. Copyright 1983 Harriet Van Home Distributed by Special Features Syndication Sales |