posted by Sam Richards
Do you have any idea how many times you’ve been lied to and didn’t know it? Really…think about it. How often does your silly, gullible self accept something as true because…well…because you believed the source? And how often have you passed on the lie to others? It’s painful for me to even think about it in my own case.
So I recently received an email from a friend that contained a video of a story that Fox News broadcast a while back. The tag line said that I needed to watch it to understand a terrible injustice brought about by liberals, illegal immigration, and political correctness — not necessarily in that order. It was one of those emails that I receive once or twice per week. Take a look at the video for yourself (it’s only a 36 second clip):
If your first response is to tilt your head to the side and scratch the back of your skull while having a dazed and confused look on your face, then you know exactly how it affected me. The thought that went along with said reaction, however, was the same one that I had when I was a kid and someone offered me the opportunity to see some freak such as a “bearded lady” at the local carnival — “this simply sounds too crazy to be true.”
Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to conduct an investigation to see if I could get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened. I started by reading some of the comments that were being made on YouTube. They were pretty scathing: “Round ‘em up and send ‘em home,” said one patriot. Another brain surgeon in the making chimed in, “This is what happens when we elect a black man as president.” (The politically correct violation that is referenced in the video occurred a couple of years ago, by the way, long before Obama entered our national spotlight.) Clearly, these blockheads were not searching for the real story and so I would not find it there.
So I plugged some combination of words such as “Oregon Mexican firefighter fired” and quickly found what I wanted: a statement from the State of Oregon’s Department of Forestry that explained the matter in considerable detail. It took me all of about 45 seconds to read, but what it revealed was very depressing (given the number of people who watched and believed the original story). I’ll summarize it for you here:
Oregon’s Department of Forestry contracts private fire crews. (Remember conservatives, privatization = cost savings = free market capitalism.) If these companies choose to hire non-English-speaking firefighters for a crew, then they must have bilingual crew leaders because while English is the official language of firefighting in the U.S., crew leaders MUST be able to communicate with their crews for purposes of safety. If a private company hires Mexican firefighters, then English only speaking crew leaders can’t lead that team. If they hire only English-speaking firefighters, then the crew leaders need only have the ability to speak English.
It makes sense that so many people hate liberals and Mexicans and political correctness with stories like this floating around on the WWW. Who wouldn’t be clamoring for the microphone to add to the shouting chorus of red-blooded citizens who want to preserve the United States for the “real Americans” (not to be confused with Native Americans, of course).
So how many times have you been duped by such an email or a rumor? How often do you find yourself saying, “No way. This can’t possibly be true. I have to tell everyone I know so this outrage will stop.” And how often do you follow that up with, “This sounds fishy and so I’d better explore it before I pass it on down the rumor mill.”?
This stuff cuts both ways, mind you, because misinformation enters the public discourse from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum. (This story originally aired on Fox News, but left-wing blogs and web sites picked it up and carried it as though it was true, by the way.) My gut inclination tells me that the right is slightly better at putting out misinformation than the left, but only because they have more money to do so. I think that both are equal in terms of their scruples about lying–but the right-wing is better at it and more flagrant about it than the left-wing. My personal opinion, folks. Perhaps that’s just because more of their political operatives have written tell all books about their strategies and misdeeds. (If you haven’t read any of these and you fancy yourself a conservative, then perhaps you ought to take a look.)
An addendum: One respondent who is a firefighter noted the utmost importance of communication while fighting fires and pointed out that non-English speaking firefighters would be problematic on English speaking crews. I absolutely agree and would maintain that Mexicans who do not speak English should NOT be on crews with U.S. firefighters who only speak English. To which I respond…no kidding.
