The Speed of Light and Darkness

Keep Those Electrons and

Pixels Coming In

Email. We all use it, communicate thru it, tear our hair out over it, and delete it. It brings news from friends and family; births, deaths, marriages, divorces. It has become ubiquitous.

For those of us of a certain age, we remember getting letters, handwritten or typed, that we held in our hands, brought by the mail carrier, and put in a box by the door. The carrier still comes, but most of the mail now is bills or catalogs, or ads. The junk mail we complained about has largely been replaced by spam. The Hormel people really don't like that.

I have a friend...let's call him John...who sends me scads of email. John is a Republican. He listens to Rush Limbaugh and watches FOX news, and while he doesn't believe everything he sees or hears, he does believe the worst bits.

John forwards a lot. He sends links to videos, photos of nature, heart-warming stories about dogs and kittens and deer. He sends funny jokes, cartoons and photoshopped stuff that'll make me laugh. I get an urgent warning about twice a year about the latest computer virus that is sweeping the net. The virus is usually about 7 years old or was a hoax to begin with. It is no longer a threat. I'm not sure he even reads some of the stuff he forwards. I have received things forwarded to me that I have sent him.

But he sends other stuff too. Dark stuff. Political stuff. And therein lies the problem.

Being a Republican, he's on a list somewhere that has his address for every crack-pot theory, birther conspiracy, teabagger nonsense, and anything else the right-wing talking points authors want to come up with. He sends dire if dated references to the Health Care Insurance Reform Act, warnings that the Democrats are coming to take your guns away, that Obama is a Muslim Communist, Marxist, Nazi, apologist who doesn't like white people and bows to foreign leaders.

If the email is a short one, I'll reply debunking it. Snopes.com is good for this or factcheck.org, or even truthorfiction.com. The really annoying thing is when the email says Snopes or one of the others supports this stuff, and when you check it out, the site actually refutes the claims. They conveniently omit that part. But John sends it on anyway, because I don't think he bothers to check it out. He just believes it.

If the email is a long one, like a letter or an article I try to find out where it came from. World Net Daily?, FOX?, News Busters? Right-wing lie factories, the lot. The lies and misstatements are too numerous to count and debunk. Who has the time? To these I reply, “Why bother? None of it's true”.

He has also sent signs seen at rabid right rallies, bumper stickers that make you want to gag, tee shirts that are offensive to anyone who has a brain. These range from outright racism to appalling ignorance, to just mindless hate and rage. Some people think these are clever or funny. They are not.

Irony and satire are lost on these people. The right isn't really into humor. You see, a joke has to have a basis in truth. The truth is not in them.

Right-wingers lap up the smears sent by email like thirsty dogs. Email travels around the world in an eye-blink. But who would suspect something that travels at the speed of light of spreading so much darkness?