I got an email this morning, a piece forwarded by a friend to friends. If you are white and living in red state country you have doubtless received similar ones. This one was about what a billion is and asserting that Louisiana Senator Landrieu is responsible for spending two hundred fifty billion dollars on New Orleans after Katrina.
That I have friends that send these things around is worrisome to me. We need to teach children in school to spot rank propaganda and to be skeptical of things that appear to be absurd as they probably are misleading or worse.
Such emails never prove to be right, just right wing and yet they go round and round endlessly, this one obviously over three years old now! What is it about people and these emails that make them work as they do?
Such emails never prove to be right, just right wing and yet they go round and round endlessly, this one obviously over three years old now! What is it about people and these emails that make them work as they do?
The first lie in this one is that the legislation was about New Orleans. It was about the State of Louisiana and the entire impacted Gulf Coast; a misrepresentation that invalidates the various mathematical calculations it asserts: dollars per person, dollars per house etc. The end theme of the email, its agenda, is we have too much government and our taxes are too high.
The difference between a third world economy and a first is not the color of the national flag, the bible being read or the genetic code of the residents; it is the presence or absence of public infrastructure, education and effective stable government, all fundamental to a functional private sector and prosperity.
We have been through a period of denying the necessity for government and are paying a heavy price for it. When we are spending too much on education, when the financial system is as stable and well run as the post office, when regulatory agencies are ahead of problems like Madoff, not behind, we can talk about taxes being too high. Until then, to all my friends, please don’t send me anymore stupid rightwing emails. Since the Vietnam War, this nation has invested itself in studied ignorance. I don’t need an inbox full of mindlessness to remind me of the detour we have been on or the backwardness of where I live.
We have been through a period of denying the necessity for government and are paying a heavy price for it. When we are spending too much on education, when the financial system is as stable and well run as the post office, when regulatory agencies are ahead of problems like Madoff, not behind, we can talk about taxes being too high. Until then, to all my friends, please don’t send me anymore stupid rightwing emails. Since the Vietnam War, this nation has invested itself in studied ignorance. I don’t need an inbox full of mindlessness to remind me of the detour we have been on or the backwardness of where I live.
Thanks
