Relationships you affect even if you don't know the person.

Hello to all, You know, I have a lot of trouble with racial statements in my classroom at times. I know several people I would categorize as racists. Here's the problem: Tonight, I received an email sent by someone I know. It contained a forward of a letter supposedly written about a statement made by a celebrity about racial prejudices by people other than white people. I read it; I even agree with some points to a small degree; however, when I took the 5 minutes to look it up on Snopes.com, it was stated to be almost totally false.

Here's my problem. All the people who read this before took the time to pick all their family and friends in their email boxes to send this letter to. They took the time to read it, blindly accept it as true, and then pass it on others. What would have hurt to have spent the 5 minutes I did to look up the validity of the letter before sending it out to 30 other people?

I have a couple of thoughts. You decide how they sound. First, the person merely passed it on because a "Friend" passed it on, so it must be true.

Second, the person passed it on because it sounded "good".

Third, the person didn't care whether it was true or not.

Okay, my take on this is that, whatever the case, whoever sends these types of emails on are adding more to the problem than taking away from them. For one, that person is basically stating that they believe this to be true, so others who know that person may believe it is true. For another, others can "assume" that, if you pass these emails on then YOU agree with them and actually promote the ideas in them. And, finally, if they turn out not to be true, you have shown that you don't check into the things you pass on, making, at least, me reserve any beliefs I might have about things you send in the future.

If it sounds like I am upset, it's because I am. What if you were one of the people who was affected by this type of email. Let's try this. How about if I chose to write something about you that was false, but really hard to prove that way. I embellish it and send it out to all my friends. They see my name and, because I am usually truthful, decide it MUST be TRUE! So, they send it out to all their friends. Now, their friends may not know either you or me; however, they believe their friends would not send out bad things about people, so they pass it on. Do you realize that if I send it out to 30 people and only 25% (7-8) people pass it on and that trend continues every 30 minutes, that:

In 1 hour, 56 people will be passing it on as true, In 2 hours, 3,150 people will be passing it on as true, In 3 hours, over 1.77 million people will be passing on as true, and In 4 hours, almost 10 million people will be passing on as true. Now, how would you feel knowing that in less than 5 hours, nearly everyone in the entire WORLD (5 billion+) might believe something about you that is terribly false?

Just something to think about when you receive emails.

As always, I love to hear your responses, Scott