Last week, an otherwise-intelligent acquaintance
from La Jolla sent me (and about a hundred other of his closest friends) an
email entitled “REFUSE NEW COINS!” The
all-caps subject line is usually a good tip off that it’s either an urban legend
or some mass hysteria among the wingnut set, which was only confirmed by the
three-inch-high exhortation to “SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!!” That always seals the diagnosis for me.
In this particular screed, “true Americans” (Strike
3) were implored not to accept the “new” dollar coins that were intentionally missing the words “In God
We Trust”. In doing so, the email rants
on, “Together we can force them out of circulation!”
Actually, that won’t be necessary. They’re already out of circulation since they
constituted some 50,000 incorrectly imprinted coins out of a batch of three
million that the U.S. Mint struck in early 2007, and instantly became
collectibles. I ascertained this in approximately
three seconds by typing the words “US coins without in god we trust” into my
browser and getting pages of articles about the error – and the ongoing annoyance
of the U.S. Mint plagued by the dingdongs who have persisted in circulating
this story over the past five years.
It’s just so easy to check this stuff. So why don’t more thinking people do it? The election hasn’t even started to get as
ugly as it’s going to but every day, both sides throw out quotes allegedly made
by the other side which range from gross distortions to patent lies. When Rick Santorum, for example, quoted
President Obama as saying that everyone should go to college (and calling him a
“snob”), it was easy to type in “Obama speech on higher education” and
instantly get both the text of Obama’s speech AND the actual video which not
surprisingly showed he didn’t say that at all.
But both parties are equally guilty of this. At this point, politicians seem to be
confident that they are preaching to a nation of sheep – and I say that with
apologies to ovines everywhere.
As for internet rumors, there are a number of easy
ways to check their validity (snopes.com, for example). Still, I’ve received so many disheartening
internet rants – political and otherwise – from people whose intelligence I
would hardly impugn but who seem inexorably committed to believe – and pass on
- whatever shows up in their in-baskets.
It just baffles me. Is curiosity
dead?
In the coming months especially, it just seems like
the entire nation needs to get a Ph.D. in skepticism. If the first four months of this election
year have been any indication, the next six are going to be a bottomless slough
of disingenuous, invidious, dissembling, specious, obfuscating, fallacious
perfidy and prevarication. On top of
that, I think there’s going to be a lot of lying.
We don’t have to believe any of it. We can fact-check it ourselves. So the next time someone sends you an urgent
internet message exhorting you to spread the word that Medicare regulations now
require doctors to ask if you keep guns in your home, that KFC can’t use the
word “chicken” anymore since those paper buckets actually contain mutant bio-engineered
organisms, that Bill Gates will send you $1,000 for forwarding a specific email
to 1,000 people, that al-Qaida plans to blow up Fashion Valley Shopping Center
on a certain date, or if someone sends
you a loony screed mis-attributed to a famous person or the “secret” recipe for
Mrs. Fields Cookies or wacky health tips alleged to have come from the Mayo
Clinic – all emails that have ended up my in-box – PLEASE DON’T FORWARD IT.
But in the meantime, SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU
KNOW!!!!
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