Editorial pages catch brunt of reader hostility.

HATE MAIL? Sure, I get mean and rotten cards and letters. Doesn't everyone who has the audacity to express a personal opinion in writing?

Often they are in this vein: "When we women have waited for decades to obtain equal employment opportunities, it is a waste and a shame they are filled by people like you. I am requesting that you be demoted to a reporter and/or be terminated."

That cranky response followed a column back in December 1990 saying why U.S. Senator Brock Adams, a liberal Democrat, should not run for re-election. It appeared several months before published reports of serious sexual misconduct against the senator prompted his quick withdrawal from the race. If only he'd followed my advice.

Not surprisingly, that column generate lots of heat. One reader suggested that, since "Doonesbury" had recently moved from the comics to the editorial page, how about "getting Mindy moved to the comic pages?"

My picture appears with my column. A copy of the Adams column was returned to me with this scrawled in red ink (or was it crayon?): "After I saw her photo I knew this was all a Republican plot. Her face would stop a clock!!..."

It was a kick to be accused of a "Republican plot," since most often my angry mail is from conservative, longtime readers of The Seattle Times who are upset over what they perceive to be a leftward drift on the newspaper's editorial page in recent years.

For four years I've been spouting my opinion in the Sunday paper. Often it's a column-as-sedative about something important but boring. Restructuring local government is guaranteed to get many readers snoozing on Sunday morning. But what opinion writer can resist such volatile current topics as abortion and sexual harassment? And if some of us don't criticize too-powerful organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired People, who will?

The vast majority of readers either ignore us or accept our views for what they are - opinions of a writer thinking aloud about the world around him or her.

But some people need to vent, and we are there for them. Increasingly, though, that venting is taking a new form. Hate mail is one thing, but hate talk?

Talk radio as practiced by some of the rudest voices on the airwaves today is a natural outlet for the anger once expressed through the mail. I went through my first bout of that new and more virulent strain of hate recently after writing an editorial about a local talk show host.

Ironically, the editorial supported the radio personality's right to do his thing without government intervention. OK, so in the process of defending his rights, I called his show "shameless huckstering" and advised listeners who didn't approve to "let him know what a jerk you think he is."

It seemed tame by the standards of his daily diatribes. But not long after that edition was on the street, the talk-radio host was on the phone asking me to do an on-air interview - in the next minute or so.

The editorial and few minutes of testy interview were fodder for several days of on-air bashing of The Seattle Times and Mindy Cameron.

I don't listen to that stuff, but I could tell what was happening when the telephone began to ring. I switched to voice mail. Messages piled up; faxes began to arrive; letters and cancellations rolled in for days.

One by one, the eruptions of ugliness blow over. But once you've been established as a target, undercurrents remain.

Late this summer I wrote a rather personal column about a very special week on the Oregon coast, my family reunion.

The day after the column appeared, there was the anonymous male voice that greets me every Monday on the reader response line: "Mindy, I don't give a damn about your stupid family reunion, but it sure is a relief to have you writing about something other than the liberal political bullshit you usually write about."

Sad, isn't it, that hate takes no vacation and is untouched even by the warmth of family gatherings.