So lovely when you're mad

Oh, you people out there, you irk me.

Especially when you have a point. Like this guy Scott St. Clair, of Kirkland. Talk about a pain in the inbox. Last year he had 30 (!) letters printed in local papers. That doesn't count all the times he gang-mailed his views directly to politicians and other masochists, like me, who publish their e-mail addresses.

Last week St. Clair, 57, finally got to me. I had blasted the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine for going after $1.8 million in attorneys' fees from Seattle schools in the race-based admissions case.

The firm said what the district did was so bad — pigeonholing people on the basis of race — that it should pay up as a form of punishment. My argument was that this was hardly Jim Crow. What the schools were doing was a diversity plan similar in aim and spirit to those still in use at businesses such as Boeing, Microsoft and, yes, Davis Wright Tremaine.

St. Clair hit back right where I live. Literally.

"It's curious that Westneat, given his personal history of being on the receiving end of similarly motivated School District abuse, isn't more sympathetic to the law firm," he wrote. "And less sympathetic to the villains of the piece, the politically motivated, educationally oblivious school board... ."

He's talking about the mess I was embroiled in last year, when, after years involved in our local school, we left due in part to an administration we felt was resistant to whites integrating a black school.

St. Clair's point: Seattle schools are so fixated on race that even the nation's highest court isn't enough to check it. The mule won't notice without "a board upside the head."

He might be right. I still think fining the schools is overkill. But I love it when a reader makes me doubt.

OK, that's a lie. You readers make me neurotic. Like when a slew of you bombarded me with vitriol after a column I wrote lamenting how Americans won't work as horse grooms at Emerald Downs.

"What is wrong with you?" wrote Bryan Morris-Ward, a family doctor in Olympia. "Are you a journalist? Or are you a good old white boy reminiscing about when we had more poor disadvantaged blacks and poor 'white trash' to do this labor for the wealthy?"

Like most readers, he said poor pay and lousy benefits keep Americans away, not laziness. Fair point. But as one who lived in a horse stable when I was 20, I also think it's true young Americans are becoming allergic to manual labor.

On the upside, there was "The plan: No plan at all," a column about my family's summer bid to do absolutely nothing.

People mention that column to me almost every day. How it reminded them of their own childhoods, when kids weren't so hyper-scheduled. Or parents so striving and busy.

"I thought I was the only one who questioned the fast-paced and overmedicated lives today's children are leading," wrote Bobbi Malone.

"You hit it just right about how overprogrammed our society has become," e-mailed Rosemary Fahey.

Who would have guessed that doing nothing is what you really want to read about?

Well, summer's definitely over. Back to irking each other.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.