Fighting Viruses

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I received an e-mail today from a political friend asking for help in answering a viral e-mail she had received. It was all about health care, and it started out so ridiculously that I have to pass it on.

It seems the writer believes that Natasha Richardson died because she was not med-evaced out of the ski area where she received the head injury that killed her. In actuality, Ms. Richardson was taken to a clinic immediately after the injury and refused to be taken to a nearby hospital for further tests to make sure her injury was not life-threatening.

When further symptoms made it clear that she should have taken the doctors’ advice, an ambulance was called, and the emergency medical technicians worked on her while she was driven to the hospital, a trip that took less than 15 minutes. Unfortunately, the swelling of her brain had caused damage that was irreversible.

Now, the e-mailer was using this tragedy as a jumping-off point to rail against health care reform, specifically Obama’s health care reform. If Ms. Richardson had been injured in America, the writer opines, she would still be alive because the U.S. has a superior health care system – including med-evac helicopters. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Later, the writer says that Obama wants to change the American health care system to be just like Canada’s and England’s. Unfortunately, she seems unaware that Canada and England have very different health care systems. Canada’s is a single-payer system, where providers are private but apply to the government for payment of fees for services. England’s is a national health system where doctors are employees of the government.

As I describe the e-mail, you may think that it requires no response, because it is so weak. Unfortunately, that is not true. These viral e-mails circulate back and forth across the Internet, sometimes morphing into truly hateful messages that accuse Democrats of total irresponsibility, if not corruption.

It takes time to write a response – or even to find the one you wrote before and modify it to fit the version of the e-mail you’re receiving this time, but it is very important that all Democrats learn the truth and “fight such bad speech with good speech.” If we remain silent, the people who receive these e-mails assumes they are true.

The e-mails are generally written by cutting and pasting from rightwing bloggers and websites, often mixing apples and oranges. Of course, no sources are provided for the assertions. You have to do the research yourself to find out where the stories come from so that you can fashion a rejoinder. But sometimes you’ll receive one that is so cleverly put together, mixing half-truths with whole lies to twist the mind of the reader, that it probably was not written by a private individual. Those are the ones that are truly viral.

Someone once said that you could have your own interpretation of the facts, but you couldn’t have your own facts. That is no longer the case. The extremes on each side not only pick and choose what information they will trumpet, but they make up information, if it fits their purposes, regardless of the truth.

What does it say about our society that there are people out there who willfully refuse to accept the truth of a situation? And what more does it say about us that there are people who make a living – often a very good living – misleading others in this way?

Nothing good.
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