John Hathaway

My mother is spreading fear and hate.

Now, my mother is in no way a hateful person. She would never knowingly spread fear and hate. But she was poisoned by a nugget of fear and hate subtly wrapped in many layers of what’s Right and tricked into passing it along.

She thought she was just forwarding an email in remembrance of those lost in the Holocaust. And that’s the Right thing to do. Right?

The motivation behind this email according to its original author is:

This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended ' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred.  This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

Kinda scary, huh? And it sounds Right. There are lots of Muslims in the UK, Right? And those wimpy Brits are always caving into this kind of stuff, Right?

But it’s not True. According to Snopes.com, this email has been circulating in some form since April 2007. The grain of Truth is that one isolated school did stop teaching about the Holocaust. So, saying “the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum” is like saying “the US removed Evolution from its school curriculum” since some particular school in the rural South decided to stop teaching Darwin. It’s taking a little something True and expanding it into a general lie that just happens to sound like it might be Right. All in the name of spreading fear and hate.

(Extra Credit: Is my argument True or does it just sound Right? How many public schools in the US have actually stopped teaching evolution?)

The email is insidiously effective because of the fundamental principle behind all propaganda:  it’s easy to believe what sounds Right; it’s much much harder to determine what’s True.

The email says:

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the,  6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were 'murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on and humiliated ' while the German people looked the other way!

It’s certainly Right that we should remember those 1,900 Catholic priests. It’s also True that 50,000 people were imprisoned as homosexuals, 5,000 to 15,000 of whom went to concentration camps.

It’s Right that we should be horrified about Nazi doctors experimenting on people just because they were a group branded inferior. It’s also True that the U.S. Public Health Service did the same thing as recently as 1972. They intentionally misled and withheld treatment to 399 poor black men in Alabama so that they could study the effects of syphilis.

It’s not easy for Americans to hear about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment because it doesn’t fit what we know to be Right about America, land of the free and home of the brave. Sounds Right is easy. True is hard. But in 1997 President Clinton finally had the courage to tell the Truth:

"The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens..."

This particular email is actually very well crafted. I didn’t really question the UK school thing at first and focused on the anti-Holocaust message as intended. (It has lots of horrific photos to keep your attention.) It took me a while to see it for what it is; to unwrap the layers of Right to clearly see the message of fear and hate at the core. It’s particularly clever to disguise a message of fear about Muslims in a message condemning the Holocaust. It’s also particularly shameful to defile the memory of those victims in order to spread yet another generation of hate.

The end of the email finally delivers the punch line that the rest has set up:

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center , 'NEVER HAPPENED '  because it offends some Muslim in the U.S. ??????

It’s Right that we should remember the attack on the World Trade Center and condemn those who did it. But is it actually True that U.S. Muslims deny it that it happened? or see it as less than a criminal act of terrorism?

How do you know? Can you tell me the names of some U.S. Muslims who feel one way or the other?

Are you happy to believe this generalized message of fear and hate? To lump all Muslims together as terrorists?

To turn a bit of the author’s language back on itself: This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each [person] is giving into it.

Don’t  let yourself be taken in by blanket messages of fear and hate without questioning them.

Have the courage to look beyond what you feel sounds Right to find what is actually True.

Vieques has trucks with large speakers mounted on them that drive around to make announcements about events, funerals, new businesses, sales, whatever. Most feature very loud salsa music. (The funerals usually go for a more reserved sound track.) Elections are coming up in November and the race for alcade (mayor) is really heating up. The incumbent  Dámaso  Serrano López and the young challenger Evelyn Delerme each have their own (possibly fleets of) announcement trucks plastered with their faces and slogans.

So when we were sitting out enjoying our evening cocktail, we didn’t really think anything of it when we heard the Dámaso truck coming up the hill. But started to know something up when heard “Barrio Lujan” (our neighborhood)  in the announcement. And then started seeing people walking down the street behind us.

A few minutes later about 20 people came walking up our street, now decked out in Dámaso  T-shirts and hats. One of them peeked in the gate and told us in English that the mayor was here and asked if we wanted to talk with him. So we got to say “mucho gusto” and chat for a couple minutes (again in English) about where we’re moving from, the fact that he’s visited San Francisco, and the recent Travel and Leisure award.  He left a 16 page booklet, all of which directly answers the question “What have you done for me lately?” (Images below)

I’m not sure that I’m very aligned with Dámaso’s politics, but it is kinda nice to be somewhere where the mayor does stroll up the street to talk to people. I wonder when Evelyn is going to drop by?

I don’t usually get this emotionally involved in news stories, but this one has me really upset in so many ways.

A gay 15 year old was shot by a classmate in southern California. Horrifying!! It’s so sad, both on the level of an individual person lost, but also on the level of the continuing issues of homophobia and gun violence in America.

The parents are, since this is America, suing the school. And while I’m nothing but sympathetic to their loss, I’m finding their legal action to be really questionable. Why?  Because they’re not claiming that the school allowed a homophobic environment hostile to their son. They’re not claiming that the school should have protected their son from guns. They’re claiming that the school didn’t enforce the dress code. The dress code? WTF?!?

Here’s the AP story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26218530/

I wonder if their lawyer told them something like this:

Well, clearly we have case against the school district. But, no, we don’t want to go near the homophobia issue or the gun issue. Those are just really too controversial. They’re issues that juries get all riled up and opinionated about. No, if we want to win this case, we need to go after something a bit less emotional and more clear-cut.

Now, indisputably, your son’s choice of clothing and the fact that he wore makeup put him in danger from his classmates. Clearly this should not have been allowed to continue. And following the doctrine of in loco parentis, it clearly was not your responsibility as his parents, but the responsibility of the school to control what he wore.

It’s easy to see how grieving parents are looking for someone, anyone, to blame. But, is it worth ignoring the real issues to make a buck? I guess their lawyer thinks so.

This is a message I originally sent out to friends on April 11, 2008. With the Olympics just underway, I thought that today would be a good time to repost here:

Chris and I went to try to see the Olympic Torch yesterday. McCovey Cove, where it was to start, is only a couple blocks from our condo. It was quite an experience!

The first photos are from the assembly area at McCovey cove. Then we went across the bridge to the ballpark where there was much more protest action. As you can see in the photos, the China and Tibet factions were very intermixed throughout in fairly small groups. The most heard chants were “Free Tibet!” answered by “Liars!” from the pro-Chinese. We saw some heated discussions, but no violence. The San Francisco police had a huge presence and seemed to be doing a good job at keeping order without really interfering. We only saw one person taken away. (From later news reports I don’t think he was actually arrested.)

Eventually, it became clear that the torch was not going to be going along the original route. The most popular rumor at the time was that it went by boat to the Ferry Building. (Which turned out not to be true.) So thousands of people started walking there down the Embarcadero. We stayed there for a while and then headed home. By the time we made it back to the ballpark, traffic was flowing again and it looked like any normal afternoon.

The impact of mobile communications technology on the event was really interesting to me. Everyone had cameras and many had video, so certainly absolutely nothing was going to happen that the world wouldn’t see. People were on phones and laptops trying to get information on what was happening and where the torch was going. I posted more than 15 updates to my Twitter (http://twitter.com/johnhat) while we were there. And it was fascinating to read what others were seeing, hearing, and doing right in the same moment.

You can see more photos here:http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=15rd3izb.5wq0wfz3&x=0&y=nzn1i0&localeid=en_US