Rant and Rage: Dick Richards responds

The Rant and Rage has been hitting the pages of various publications for a year now and has garnered responses of laughter, admiration and a lot of anger. Do I, Dick Richards, care? Not really.

As summer vacation looms on the horizon, I figured I’d take this chance to respond to the past year’s articles, comments and readers.

Perhaps one of the more popular articles was “Believe it or not, this pisses me off,” highlighting the hypocrisy of organized atheism. Quite a few responses assumed I was some sort of evangelical writer on a mission against non-believers. They obviously didn’t read the article too closely. Look, I don’t care what group it is, when you throw a bunch of people together the potential for mass stupidity is endless. In the case of organized atheism, is the potential for all the same downfalls as organized religion there? Certainly, as shown in all the responses I got. I could interchange the online comments from arrogant atheist with arrogant believers, and they would look the same.

I usually get e-mails or online comments from readers, but the first physical fan letter/marriage proposal was received last week in response to the article “‘Ugg’ is slang for ugly—stop wearing them!” Sorry ladies, Mr. Richards is in a committed relationship with a happily bitter woman.

“The kids aren’t all right” produced a bit of irate comments. The spanking aspect of the article threw folks into a hissy. Whatever you think about spanking, it doesn’t stop your brat from being a societal plague when parents tolerate and allow them to misbehave in public. Sure, a little acting out here and there is to be expected, but it is still not OK to allow it to continue and fester. Pay attention to your kids, people!

Thanks for reading over the past year. As you head off to your vacations and summer fun, rest assured that I’m out there, and I’m pissed off.