Whenever I do get one of the urban legends, I check it out
on either the Snopes website, www.snopes.com,
or the second, Truth or Fiction, at www.truthorfiction.com. Both of these are excellent resources. If
the urban legend is political in nature, I also go to www.factcheck.org
for verification.
I find that a huge percentage of the alerts, warnings and
such are false, and many of them are also so misleading that they would cause
more harm than good.
A recent offering that I got concerned a nurse’s recounting
her experiencing a heart attack. It
turned out that that one was true, although somewhere along the line someone
had added a falsehood to the story. If
you care to read the message, with corrections, go to the Internet and type in:
http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/heartattack.asp.
I rarely forward any of the e-mails that request me to
“...forward to at least (insert a #) people...” whether or not there is a
threat of bad luck or promise of some reward or good luck. Let’s face it, they clutter the “In Box” and
usually are more harmful than helpful.
As a matter of fact, I also get messages from Kim Komando
every day. (If you don’t know who she is, you must not listen to your radio on
Saturday mornings) Although Kim is very
helpful to computer geeks, her messages and the accompanying ads can be
overwhelming. I’m considering the
action to unsubscribe to her newsletters.
There are still three political organizations that send me
e-mails, and they are always accompanied by ads, too. You know, it is disgusting that my first and my last act of the
day is to sit at my PC and read all of my e-mail messages. I spend no less than three hours of every day sitting at the
desk reading messages and deciding what to do, save, forward, delete, or try to
unsubscribe—a process that often is useless and doesn't work.
Folks, I’ve become a slave to my computer. It doesn’t pay me to do this, but it seems
to force me to return periodically to clean out all the trash.
With the latest round of legislation and court rulings
coming out of Washington, it could be possible to label any slight of our
leaders as a crime. We still don’t know
anything for certain about the couple occupying the White House, but even
speculation could be treated as an indictable offense.
Am I paranoid? Maybe
I am, but the other side was just as paranoid during the eight years under
President George W Bush. If they can
have their black helicopters, so can we.
Here is what I propose we do. Since most of you are on the same page as I am, let’s make a
resolution to stop forwarding political or religious email messages to those
people whom we know are on our side.
I already try to avoid sending messages to those of you who
I absolutely know are card-carrying Democrats or professed liberals, (er, uh,
progressives) and will be offended. You
are most likely doing that too for your conservative (er, uh, whacko) friends.
So we are already excluding those whom we feel do not want
to learn the truth as we see it.
The only people we continually send our “message’ to are those who
already agree with it. The question is
“Why?” We aren’t converting anyone, and
we see the exact same message 10-20 times.
Stopping the political and religious message traffic would
have the added benefit of cutting down on all message traffic, because a huge
amount of it falls into that category.
Now, even if you can’t control yourself enough to cease and desist, at
least consider this before you send it on:
1.
Have you seen it, or something similar previously?
2.
Does the message seem current and relevant?
3.
Can you verify the factual content?
4.
Is it really worth sending?
5.
Will the message make a difference to the recipient?
If it doesn't pass all five of those tests, don't forward
it. It's just that simple. Maybe I can spend more time reading a good book, or
writing more of my scintillating columns.
You'll welcome the extra time, as well.
