Time for a Hissy Fit by Darby Britto

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On Political Spam

Time for a Hissy Fit

by Darby Britto | 3, Add your Comment | Oct 13, 2012

Soon, but not soon enough, it will be safe to open my email from friends I don’t hear from regularly. I hope the nonsense will stop Wednesday Nov. 7th, the day after the presidential election. Meanwhile, I dread opening email from anyone except my regular corespondents. I keep hoping the odd email will be good news like an impending visit from a far flung friend, but noooooo it is usually some political diatribe.

Why do people, who should know me better, insist on sending me some of this stuff? I am talking about those emails forwarded to me from who knows where originally. I can only assume some of them are composed as therapy in an asylum. You get these too, right? While these emails are gussied up for the cotillion, they forgot to put the hoops in their skirts.

Fact checking people! How about some source attribution from bi partisan watch dogs? I know that for Dew readers I am preaching to the choir, but my grits are getting stirred. My normal MO is to just delete the darn things and get on with more important tasks like checking my horoscope. I have to admit that the other day I snapped. I responded to one of the perpetrators and I am afraid I wasn’t using my inside voice.

I did some, dare I say it, internet research not involving Wikipedia, Fox, or MSNBC. I find a good bourbon helpful in these situations. I quoted bipartisan a sources with links back to the original material, just in case my intended reader thought I must have read something incorrectly… FactCheck.org, League of Women Voters, are where I usually start, there are plenty of good resources out there.

I eventually got into “we can change the world” mode, or the bourbon did it’s thing. I closed my email by suggesting we all stop wasting time ranting about the latest dumb idea from either side and suggested we spend our time on the internet, (while wearing our bunny slippers and tiaras) more wisely. Perhaps if we engage in real conversation with each other, and not the voices in our heads ( although mine are erudite as well as witty), we can actually accomplish something. Differing political viewpoints might help us understand more thoroughly the problems we face as a country. Differing political viewpoints might help us see our way to some solutions and any unintended consequences, good or bad, of our course of action.

Obviously I have been out in the hot sun too long if I expected to get a response from my friend. I am not deterred, but taking on my Facebook feed is another matter altogether, I hope I never become that unhinged.

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Hannah

It’s not possible to have a rational discussion with people who want to hog-tie you and burn you at the stake for not agreeing with them. Where do they get this attitude? I think they’re born with it. Unfortunately, caring parents seem to reinforce what is surely a juvenile attitude, and mean ones make them ornery.
Frank Povah

As someone who can buy a gun but not vote I am more amused and bewildered than horrified, but I ma getting increasingly pissed off by the stream of emails: overtly religious, inadvertently (perhaps) racist, hair-tigger reactionary certainly, definitely xenophobic (senders of such, please note: if you rail against Arabs you are being xenophobic, not racist. Arabs are of the same race as you), most from people who, under normal circumstances i’m sure are none of the above. They are stretching the bounds of acquaintance -- let alone friendship.
Tom Poland

Politics: a boring topic to avoid whenever possible.

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