I don't know about you, but I have pretty much had all I can take of the ludicrous, inflammatory, irrelevant, often completely fictional e-mail forwards I get every day. Maybe it's just my family (the source of 90% of the tripe I receive on a daily basis). It's tiresome. It clogs up my inbox. And it often makes me sad.
It is sad to me how quick people are to click that forward button and send loads of pure horseshit to everybody on their mailing list, without any regard for truth. It generally takes about 5 seconds to Google whatever inflammatory crap has your knickers in a twist, and find out that it is wholly without fact. That part pisses me off. Because that means people must either just not care, or that they actually believe their own hype. And at least a few of the zillions of people they forward it to are going to believe it too. These beliefs, however misguided, are what shape people's realities, their perceptions of the world. And maybe most unfortunately, these people, along with their distorted realities, are going to be voting in a few weeks.
I've read recently that Obama is the anti-Christ in an email claiming to quote scripture that just doesn't exist, forwarded to me by self-avowed Christians. I've watched a video that has finally linked illegal Mexican immigrants to 9/11. I've read that, should Obama win the election, Christians would no longer be allowed to freely worship their God. Just this morning I read an email about how much more stoic the flood victims in
For a while, I tried to reply to the most offensively misleading or false forwards I got. But I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth even trying. If people can actually be so myopic and fallacious in their thinking and reasoning as to give credence to this crap in the first place, how am I to make a difference?
What scares me is the ease and speed with which misinformation is spread via the internet, and that there are hundreds of thousands of misguided people who will be taking all this crap with them to the polls. We should all be frightened.
Before I start getting angry replies here, I'd like to address my own obvious bias. I make no bones about the fact that I am liberal in my political views. However, I know and respect many people whose views are quite the opposite. In no way do I feel that I have all the answers, or that someone's opinions are valid only so far as they align neatly with mine. We all have our passions, we all have our priorities, and we all have the right to our own opinions. I only ask that they be considered opinions, arrived at through reflection and reason. I resent being looked at as somehow 'less moral', 'less patriotic', or 'less spiritual' because of my politics. Because it is precisely my deep sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice, the morals and ethics I hold most dear that make me who and what I am.
But the ridiculous, mean-spirited, unproductive, frighteningly often racist and xenophobic propaganda - OPINIONS dressed up as and passing for FACT, that just makes me sad. It worries me for our collective intelligence as a people...as a democracy.
Sadder still when I get these hateful things from family members and friends I have long looked up to and respected. People whom I know consider themselves good Christians. People I have always considered good people.
As passionate as I am in my beliefs, I always strive to remain open minded and if I learn something new and compelling I have no problem adjusting my views accordingly. How sad that lately the only thing I've had occasion to reevaluate in regards to these emails is my respect for their senders.
