Not the Election Day Blog You Would Have Thought

I'm sure everyone has been receiving hundreds of emails, viewing thousands of away messages, and opening many notes, status updates, bulletins, and the like on facebook & myspace telling them to vote.

I've noticed that for the most part, everyone I know is not just voting, but very proud of the fact that they can and are. I know a few people who aren’t voting because they failed to register at their current residence or are out of the country and couldn’t be bothered filling out an absente ballot, but they aren’t my concern. Voting is your responsibility... and who you vote for is your business. I'm not going to tell you to vote, I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, and I definitely am not going to judge you based on any assumptions.

What I will tell you is that I do not appreciate or respect the dozens of forwards I've received in the late months with links to videos or attachments of powerpoints littered with false accusations. I've received many which are so obviously laced with racism and I find it disgraceful. I've received maybe a dozen more filled with lies. You'd think that people haven’t read a news article in a news paper written any better than the NY Post. Or worse yet, they haven’t read one at all. You'd think that the people who created them live in some fantasy world that no one really knows about but themselves. People amaze me with their ignorance, but what amazes me more is their willingness to spread that ignorance to others.

For the most part, upon receiving these emails, I can tell right away based on the subject line that they are politically driven and I click delete. What amazes me are the people who’ve sent them to me. These people are my friends who I always thought were educated, smart, and more importantly respectable. How then can they honestly forward these emails along and think themselves mature. It is parallel to the spreading of rumors in high school.

What gets me the most is the huge possibility that people receiving these forwards know nothing else. These people may have never watched a presidential debate, read a NY Times, or turned on CNN. All their political information has been gained from talk on the street, the front page of the Metro/AM NY or worse, comics. Then they receive these fabricated story lines created by bored uneducated individuals and knowing nothing else, believe them to be factual and informative. Those very same people take that information to the voters’ box. Maybe the uneducated creators of these emails aren’t so uneducated after all; maybe that has been their purpose all along.

Think about it…