The older I get, the more I embrace being from Missouri, the “Show Me” state–or maybe I’m just morphing into a female Andy Rooney. Either way, I sure am getting annoyed at the number of forwarded email messages in my in-box that are shotgunned to the masses. The problem is not that a message has been forwarded or even that my name is among a host of others; the problem is that nine times out of ten, the message is false. Bogus. Completely wrong. My friends call me a spam Nazi because I always check the authenticity of a message and then reply to their message with the link proving the message’s falseness–by “replying all,” of course.

Email hoaxes have circulated about the CIA being responsible for creating the AIDS virus, the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” being a coded reference to the Black Plague, a co-ed at the University of Texas losing both of her kidneys to organ thieves,  Cambodian midgets fighting a lion, and a missing shipment of UPS uniforms presumably having been stolen by terrorists, and a host of others. It’s impossible to know how many more untruths are being circulated to millions and millions of people, but suffice it to say that truth-finding websites such as truthorfiction.com, snopes.com, and breakthechain.com are doing a booming business.

It’s bad enough that my in-box is filled with messages that I do not even bother to open. It seems that ordering from an online source even one time apparently gives the go-ahead to be on a company’s mailing list. So, about once a month, I take the time to siphon through those messages and unsubscribe from future mailings. It takes time, but it’s time well spent. But I’ve gotten to the point that I’m about to go Mommy Dearest on a couple of friends who insist on sending me bogus messages that are political in nature, and frankly, even though I lean to the right of center, it just isn’t right to spread untruths about the President. Or anyone. Or anything, for that matter. Bernard Baruch, advisor to U.S. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, said that ‘every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions, but  no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.’ So, with several websites available to check a message’s authenticity, why perpetuate untruths?

There are not enough hours in my day to do all the things I would like to do, so why anyone takes the time to make up something with the intention of spreading it virally is beyond me. Neither am I a psychologist, but having been a special ed teacher, I postulate that people who create hoaxes just want attention. Even though it would be extremely difficult for them to know exactly how many times and to whom their message was forwarded, perhaps these individuals, in some twisted way, feel “successful” for pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Or maybe such individuals view their email hoax as a type of viral vandalism in which their anger against a certain political figure can be vented both secretively and publicly. It’s almost as if their underlying motives are like those of vandals who spray graffiti on walls of buildings in the dead of night or slash the seats of a movie theater in the dark. Even though such motives are pointless to most, there must be some intrinsic value to creating an email hoax, such as a sense of power, or perhaps just a cheap thrill.

I hope that my friends who insist on forwarding forwarded messages read this and either start checking out the authenticity of something they think I need to see or just not send it at all, but I doubt they will. After all, how can my rant possibly compare to a supposed website that advocates techniques for creating Bonsai kitties?