When I shared a story recently about a particularly vulgar piece of anonymous mail sent to me, I wanted to offer an observation about the change I’ve seen in public discourse.

Journalists have always had to field some angry responses. In my experience, that hate mail has become openly bigoted lately.

I was surprised by how many readers responded to that column. Nearly a hundred people wrote or called to say this anonymous letter upset them, and to offer a counter-perspective. Some even pulled out their own embossed stationery and note cards, while one reader sent a two-page handwritten letter. Many said they felt “compelled” to respond and shared their own backgrounds and reasons why. A 76-year-old gentleman said he was educated in Catholic schools and the only religions he had known of back then were “Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.”

“Your last weekend’s column haunted me ... Please don’t let it hurt your feelings or change you in any way,” he wrote. Rest assured, I wasn’t hurt nor intending to change.

Another older reader said she appreciated learning about Muslim traditions and my family’s cultural background from reading the column for years.

“I often think that, despite our age difference, we would be friends if we met,” she wrote. I’m inclined to agree whenever readers suggest we would be friends in real life. I’m a huge fan of newspaper readers as it is. And subscribers, I love. Even those who have never agreed with a single word I’ve written.

The writers of many of the notes said they were worried about the emboldened bigots and demise of civility, especially since the last election. One woman shared her coping strategy: “I think the best way ... is to get politically involved, volunteer in the community and do random acts of kindness. I will not sink to their level,” she wrote.

Her words inspired me to try to be kinder.

To be fair, there were a minority of dissenters: Those who said they see far worse vitriol from the left, and those who said journalists were bringing personal attacks upon themselves for their “biased” coverage.

I’ll leave it for readers to judge where they see most of the personal attacks and bigotry coming from. But, it is startling to see the two different realities that exist in our country right now. We used to be able to agree on a very basic set of facts and values, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. It seems that many of us can look out of the window and see rain, while others will insist it’s sunny.

A surprising number of those who wrote described themselves as white and then apologized for the bigoted mail others had sent. I appreciate their sentiment, but I hope they know that I would never hold an entire group responsible for the behavior of the fringe elements. As a Muslim, I’ve seen how collective blame works. Even those who abhor the hateful actions of a few are made to feel guilty. That’s always unfair.

A few readers shared that their families received anonymous angry letters in their mail after a letter to the editor they had written was published. It was disconcerting that a stranger had gone to the trouble of looking up the address of private citizens, writing and mailing an insulting letter simply because he or she disagreed with their opinions.

Unfortunately, there will always be those who try to stifle other people’s voices.

As an antidote, there were notes like this one: “I read your articles every week, and I agree with some and disagree with others, but I will always defend your right to express your opinion ... I’m a 71-year-old Army veteran who will always defend anyone’s right to express their opinion in a civil manner.”

Several readers who sent encouraging notes asked me to show their emails to my daughter, who had seen the original letter I wrote about. I printed out those emails and made sure she read them. Your responses taught her an even more important lesson -- that there are far more good and decent people in the world than those who seek to divide us.

I didn’t expect the avalanche of reactions you sent.

Thank you for flooding my inbox with hope.

There were two words that popped out at me from the initial statement issued by a suburban St. Louis police department after its officers falsely accused 10 black Washington University students of leaving an IHOP without paying.

“Certainly, I’m sorry they were inconvenienced and anxious about what happened,” Clayton Police Chief Kevin R. Murphy said a week ago. (The department has since offered an apology for how the situation was handled.)

“Inconvenienced” and “anxious” turned my stomach.

It’s not an “inconvenience” when you are detained and questioned by a state authority, despite being innocent of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t just make you “anxious” when you are considered suspect largely because of your race, ethnicity or religion.

For those who have never experienced that sort of situation, I’ll share what it felt like when I traveled to Israel in 2012. My husband and I went as tourists with a group of journalists, my colleagues during my Knight Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. My husband, who was a British citizen and American permanent resident back then, is always detained for extra security clearance every single time we travel internationally.

This time, as we entered Israel at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, I was the subject of intense scrutiny. We were both taken out of the entry line and led to a waiting room. There was one other young man in the room with his elderly mom. They were Orthodox Christians who had come to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Palm Sunday. I asked him how long he had been waiting to get cleared for entry. When he said 10 hours, my heart sank.

After 45 minutes of sitting and waiting, I got more nervous.

The Israelis had my passport. How long would I be held in this room? Would I be able to communicate with the rest of the group waiting for us? What was going to happen next?

In that moment, you feel powerless. You’ve lost your freedom of movement. You are at the mercy of those already suspicious of your very identity.

You don’t feel inconvenienced. You feel like a hostage.

I was taken back to a smaller interrogation room. Four different Israeli authorities asked me why I was coming to the country. They also wanted to know: my father’s name, my grandfather’s name, where I was born, where my parents were born, where my parents lived in America, who I would be seeing in Israel, where I would be going and staying, who I was traveling with, which countries my travel companions were from, my occupation, what I write about, how I knew the person who arranged the trip, my personal email address, my cell number and my home number in the United States.

I was worried about accidentally misspeaking during this interrogation. I tried to remember my grandfathers’ given names, versus the titles and names I knew them by. I wondered if the security officials were going to ask for the passwords to my email accounts, and how I would respond. I have a public online profile and body of work, so a quick Google search would have revealed exactly who I am.

Most of all, I wondered if this ordeal had been worth trying to see a part of the world I had always wanted to visit. About an hour into this, an influential Israeli journalist who was helping coordinate things for our group made a call on our behalf to the airport authority. We were released shortly thereafter.

Now imagine you are a teenager -- away from home, under suspicion for a crime you didn’t commit, unsure of what might happen to you, and more than likely having seen plenty of videos of police officers fatally shooting unarmed black men.

You don’t feel “anxious” in that situation. You are scared, angry, humiliated, panicked and upset.

Like those Wash U student, I benefited from the backing of a powerful institution.

If these students hadn’t been affiliated with Wash U, would any of us even have heard about it? Would the Clayton Police Department have apologized days later? If an Israeli journalist had not intervened on my behalf, how many hours would I have sat in that interrogation room with armed security questioning me?

The aftermath of the Clayton incident provoked revealing commentary on all sides of the issue.

I read thoughts of those who do not worry about being pulled over every time they drive, who do not think about being detained and questioned every time they fly, who do not expect neighbors to call the police on their children if they set up a lemonade stand in front of their homes. I suppose if you haven’t frequently found yourself suspect for no reason but your race or ethnicity, you might be able to have a casual attitude about being detained by police.

If the police got a report that young black diners left a restaurant without paying, well then, what were the cops supposed to do but stop a group of black kids they see in the vicinity? Regardless of whether some of the kids had receipts, regardless of how few matched a limited description, what’s the big deal of “inconveniencing” 10 students when a $60 unpaid bill is at stake?

Perhaps consider an alternate scenario where it might be your own children under a cloud of suspicion for similar reasons. Nearly all mass school shooters are male. Should any threat or hoax prompt the police to detain, search and question male students based on the most common demographic traits of school shooters? What if your teenage son was pulled out of his class because he looked like Nikolas Cruz, Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, all of whom have committed some of the worst mass school shootings in America?

What if it was your teenage child who was publicly embarrassed, suspected of a crime, questioned and detained by police because he matched a description?

I mean, what are the police supposed to do?

When Patrice Billings retired as a police helicopter pilot nearly a decade ago, her former chief sent her a lovely note thanking her for her service and for representing the department with high standards.

Recently, she called him with an unlikely request. Billings is running as a Democrat for a state Senate seat in Missouri’s deep-red St. Charles County. She knows her former chief is a conservative, but she took a risk and called him to make her case.

“You know I’m a Republican,” he told her. But he listened to what the first-time candidate had to say.

Billings, who has lived in her district for 33 years, says it was easier to come out as gay than as a Democrat in this largely conservative community. After the last election, she decided she couldn’t stand by the sidelines any longer. She saw the state legislature failing to properly fund schools or address crises like the opioid epidemic.

“If not me, who? If not now, when?” she asked herself the familiar questions.

She’s part of a record number of women candidates running in an unexpected place -- a county where Trump won by a little more than 26 points. In this area, Republicans have run unopposed for many seats for years. That’s starting to change with these nine women, eight of whom are running for office for the first time. They are part of a national “pink wave:” Women make up 23 percent of non-incumbents running for congressional seats in 2018, compared to 16 percent in the previous two cycles. Nearly 80 percent of these women have been Democrats. Of the Democratic nominees for the U.S. House of Representatives so far, more than 40 percent are women, according to an NBC News analysis, compared with less than 10 percent of the Republican nominees.

Several of the St. Charles County candidates were recruited by Cheryl Hibbeler, whose family has deep roots in the area and who has previously held political office. She saw that a seat on the St. Charles County Council was not being contested, and decided to join the group of candidates.

“I wanted to be part of this team, and be brave with them,” she said. They come from diverse backgrounds -- they include a prosecutor, an educator, a business owner -- but they were all convinced that running for office was part of the solution to address the problems they saw.

Christine Hedges, who is also running for the county council, said she started going to marches and meetings after the last election and came to a realization: “Nothing was going to change unless we elect people to office who are going to change things.”

She said she didn’t even know there were other Democrats in St. Charles County.

“I thought I was the only one,” she said.

Jill Aul, who is president of the Ethical Society Mid Rivers, understands the feeling of being what she calls “a blueberry in a tomato soup.”

“It’s very isolating,” she said. It may not feel safe to reveal your political beliefs until you are sure of who you are talking to -- although this last election has brought Democrats out of the woodwork, according to Morton Todd, chairman of the St. Charles Democratic Central Committee.

Aul said she is amazed by the bravery of the women campaigning against the odds, often at a tremendous fundraising disadvantage.

“I’m just overwhelmed with joy and hope,” she said. “Of course, I want them all to win, but just the fact that they are running is thrilling and exciting and hopeful.”

Some of the candidates, like Katy Geppert, running for U.S. Congress in Missouri’s 3rd district, recognize the David-and-Goliath nature of their fight. She works full-time in a STEM field, has a 2-year-old daughter and found out she was pregnant after she decided to run. She and her husband discussed what it would mean for her to be campaigning during her pregnancy and with a newborn.

“We just decided we can do it,” she said. “We can figure it out. The consequences of inaction were so much greater than getting involved.” When she is out visiting farmers markets and attending school board meetings, other women will whisper to ask her if she’s running as a Democrat. Several have quietly said they are glad to have an option.

Lorna Frahm, who is running for county executive, pointed out that the entire council is white Republican men older than 50, while more than half of the county is female.

“My candidacy is already a win for democracy,” she said.

Billings, who had called to ask her former boss for his support, asked him if he would consider voting for someone who had integrity and the character and values he wanted in a candidate -- even if she didn’t share his party affiliation.

He ended up making a donation to her campaign.