|
Digital Slob Curt Brandao |
We will risk eternal
hellfire and hit delete
This week, we continue our countdown of "10 Stupid Things Respectable People Do to Mess Up the World."
No. 4: Spiritual spamming: Standard junk e-mail is bad enough. But when Respectable People who we know, and pretend to trust, forward meandering morality essays into our inboxes, Digital Slobs feel betrayed.These faux friends obligate us to open e-mails that are designed to reshape our principles, and though meant to speak to our better selves, they leave most Slobs plotting criminal acts, just because we happen to know where these spammers live.
Spiritual spam comes in all shapes and sizes: A random act of kindness prevents a suicide, a man's savior lets him ride piggy-back on a beach, a diseased baby in Colombia, needs help with elephantiasis -- they all read like The Twilight Zone on Prozac.
Here's a typical unnerving example with an anonymous author, titled "Shake It Off and Step Up." Life-affirming on the surface, but demented to the core:
A mule falls into a farmer's well. Though he "sympathizes" with the mule, the farmer decides to get his friends to help him shovel dirt into the hole, thus burying the animal alive to "put him out of his misery."
Since the mule has never seen reruns of MacGyver, it "panics," the story states. But then the animal realizes that if it shakes the dirt off its back and steps on it, it'll inch closer to the top. As the dirt falls, the mule continues to shake and climb, and eventually rises high enough to jump out of the well.
The spoon-fed moral: "Adversities usually come with the potential to benefit and bless us!"
Now, if you find this popular e-mail parable inspirational, you must be a Respectable Person, because all Digital Slobs (and certainly any mule with a modem) would find it to be 2 kilobytes of pure horror in hypertext format.
Far from inspired, we're haunted with countless disturbing questions after reading this story, such as:
>> What kind of "sympathy" for one of God's creatures allows a farmer to not only bury it alive in a well, but to make a block party out of it? I know farmers are all about the bottom line, but have federal farm subsidies become so bloated as to make all this a reimbursable expense?So stop with the e-mailed chain prayers, Respectable People. If you want to give us directions to heaven, well, that's what voicemail is for.>> Wouldn't a bullet to the head (or even a mid-sized rock if the fable is set circa The Last Supper) be more humane? A single blast from a shotgun would be a lot tougher for the mule to shake off, and it would make the rest of the job a lot quieter.
>> How long would the farmer's friends shovel once they realized their murderous plot wasn't working? It takes a lot more dirt to get the mule back to sea level than it does to kill it. If it turns into a rescue operation, it'll take all night. Don't they have their own clumsy farm animals to worry about?
>>How are the farmer and the mule ever going to restore trust to their relationship? The farmer was intent on killing it, after all, and would have if not for the mule's fancy footwork. Beasts of burden are famous for holding a grudge. You can't plow too many fields with a mule that's testing the ground it walks on half the time and obsessively watching its back the rest.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's production editor. Reach him at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com