ONE by-product of Hawaii public schools being "wired" is teachers can now unleash floods of e-mail on the unsuspecting. That happened this week when a class was assigned to write us in response to a story about President Clinton's releasing brown tree snake control money. E-mail gems among stones
Predictably, most of the notes stressed the absolute necessity to quash this horrible menace. However, one student - expressing either an ironic sense of humor or of the macabre - wrote that he was disappointed when he found out that there were no snakes in Hawaii and would much rather look at snakes than birds.
Since e-mail seems more private than it often is, it's also become a vehicle for sharing the kind of off-color, non-PC (meaning politically incorrect, not Macintosh) humor that few would utter out loud nowadays. Ethnic, priest-rabbi and dumb-blonde jokes are fired in bursts to mailing lists that often include hundreds of mailboxes.
Either way - many inane messages to one receiver or one inane message to many - e-mail abuse is becoming a fact of life.
Still, gems come over the wires that make up for it. Take this note from a nun in California about our coverage of same-sex marriage: "Keep up the good work. There are a lot of us here that are praying that truth and justice will prevail. Your articles and balanced reporting of the issues can only serve to enlighten those who chose to live in darkness."
Amen.
