Incoherent OMG outrage WTF tomatoes !?!?!??!

Again, I don't have time for a blog post; again, there are more interesting things I've been wanting to blog about for weeks; and again, something else comes up and I just have to write about it.

Yesterday, my father forwarded me a "send this to everyone you know" email from a total stranger complaining about how the school he works at in some southern state is full of (presumably illegal) immigrant kids and how they're all fat and they all have cell phones and they don't eat their free school lunches that we, the taxpayers, so generously give them. And then blah blah blah about the cost of "supporting" these ungrateful people who "take our jobs" etc etc etc.

(My father dutifully forwards everything he's told to, or at least I assume he does, based on how much of it I've been getting lately.)

Thanks to the magic of html formatting in emails (I so miss the happy days of plain text), there was lots of underlining, and italics, and different size fonts, and possibly colors. (I've deleted the email and hope never to see it again, so I can't check.)

The point of all this, believe it or not, had something to do a certain fast food restaurant refusing to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes, although I'm not at all sure that he really understood the issue since he didn't go into any detail at all. If he had understood the issue, he probably would have mentioned Burger King by name and told everyone to go there. Then we could all eat there, get fat, and talk on our cell phones, glad that that extra penny per pound wasn't getting wasted on those fat, cell-phone-using children.

It doesn't matter whether he understood the issue or not, because his argument was so vague and poorly constructed that there was no way of knowing what he expected you to do, besides forward the email. It went something like "fat Mexican kids on cell phones, your tax dollars at work, stealing our jobs, I'm upset about the tomatoes, forward this to everyone you know."

I guess this person doesn't know that fattening fast food is cheaper than nutritious food; doesn't remember what school food tastes like; doesn't know how cheaply you can get a cell phone these days; doesn't see these kids helping to support their families at their minimum wage night jobs; doesn't know that not all immigrants are here illegally; doesn't know that the cost of providing social services to the indigent (everyone, not just immigrants) pales in comparison to other government expenditures that some of us find repulsive; doesn't know that the people who use fake SSNs to work will never collect the money they're paying into Social Security (that's right, it's free money for the rest of us); and doesn't know that picking tomatoes for agriculture minimum wage (less than regular minimum wage in most states) is not the American dream.

Maybe he does know. Or maybe he suspects. But he's not going to mention any of that because that would interfere with the outrage he's trying to evoke in the reader. Instead, after reading this eyesore of a temper tantrum, we're supposed to imagine that these kids are stealing high-paying investment banker jobs.

I'm not sure how being fat, having cell phones, and being nauseated by cafeteria food makes them any different from other kids, nor how a stranger's bitter and wildly exaggerated description (they're all fat? they all have cell phones? and if so... so what?) would change my opinion of anything, but it's obvious that the people who enjoy these "outrage" emails just like to groove on the hatefulness of them, rather than do any thinking. They won't listen to a reasonable, well-informed argument; but give them a meaningless, uninformed, strongly-worded, unfocused opinion with so clearly stated point, and they'll eat it up.

And I wouldn't care so much if these people didn't vote. Maybe there's a way to screen for that at the polling place. "Do you get most of your news and information about the world from forwarded emails? Great! Just put your ballot through this special scanner." Or maybe we could create our own forward-everywhere email telling people that if they vote, they will die. Then we add a slew of fake headers at the top to give it that air of frequently-forwarded credibility.

Actually, I think I've seen this email before, without the paragraph about the tomatoes. I see on Snopes all the time where someone has revived some old forwarded piece of crap, tacked on a new "message" paragraph at the beginning or end, and then sends it back into the world as reincarnated crap. I wish that if people would do that, that they'd choose a more coherent, less ignorant piece of crap. But maybe there's no such thing.

Useful Spanish of the day
La misma mierda de siempre
The usual shit (literally, "same shit as always")