I post a lot of the hate mail I get. Here’s a much nicer email:

I fired off a very modest donation to The Agitator just now (I called the item in paypal something like ‘you the man radley’), and just wanted to say a little about why I chose to do so. I believe you are doing some of the most important work of any journalist in America right now. And as a guy who gets some of the most depressing news about our country from you, I can only imagine how depressing it is to be the guy who actually delievers it on a daily basis. You seem like the kind of guy who would keep on doing what he’s doing regardless of any spiritual/monetary support, but I wanted to give you just a little of both. At the end of the day, I’m a pretty well-off white male who doesn’t enjoy (arbitrarily) illegal drugs, and I am as unlikely as anybody to be a victim of the sorts of things one reads about on The Agitator (until a SWAT team gets the address wrong, anyway). That said, I care very deeply about freedom in this country, both for myself and others (because when you get right down to it, you can’t really disentangle the two), and I think you’re doing as much as anyone else right now for that cause. I can’t tell you how happy I was when you made the move to my favorite magazine, Reason (aesthetics be damned, I won’t dignify the lowercase r !!). Definitely seems like the right place for you. And I think its fantastic you’ve been testifying on Capitol Hill–everything I saw/read looked great. Keep it up! I know there are a lot of other people out who feel the same way as me about your work, even if you don’t hear from all of them.

Can’t tell you how refreshing it is to get email like this (the donation is nice, too!). What I do can get to be a downer at times, but it’s also tremendously rewarding. And I do try my best to intersperse some levity and humor into these pages so it’s not so heavy all the time.

Anyway, many thank yous to this guy, and to the rest of you who pass a long similar notes of encouragement. Means a lot.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 3:38 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.