Error of My Ways

So, the much feared speech is now history. The country has survived. Our children have returned from school much as they left. They’ve not joined the new Hitler youth. They haven’t morphed into pint sized socialists. Of course, the doomsday sayers and tinfoil hat brigade will have you believe that is only because they shed light on the secret plot, thereby causing President Obama to rethink his evil plan and revise the planned speech to one of a more benign message.

Though I make my living on the internet and my extended social life is just as entrenched in the virtual world as most Americans, I am not blind to the drawbacks of the internet age. In my opinion, the single greatest societal change brought about by the advent of the internet is that it lends an aura of credibility to even the most lunatic fringe of society.

In the days before the internet, the crazy on the street corner shouting messages of the coming apocalypse was just that - the crazy on the street corner. Now, not only can anyone publish their rantings to a world wide audience, the internet has enabled the crazies from all the street corners around the globe to find one another. Suddenly, you have all these voices joining together to shout out the same message of the falling sky. They can compare notes on the latest conspiracy theories. Then the ignorant and the gullible can stumble upon these gatherings of the insane and it suddenly isn’t just the ravings of a lone lunatic. No, it’s words of the new truthsayers.

You suddenly have people believing these wild ideas because… they read it on the internet, of course. It must be true! The powers that be cannot keep these warriors of the web from shedding light on The Truth.

Seriously, people. Bill Gates is not going to send you $5000 for forwarding emails, Neiman Marcus didn’t charge some lady $250 for a cookie recipe, no one is going to drug you and steal your kidneys, George W. Bush wasn’t the secret mastermind behind 9/11 and President Obama isn’t trying to indoctrinate your children.

Common sense - it seems to be in short supply lately. You might want to stock up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.