Chain-mailed and Unchanged

Today I found another chain-letter in my inbox; and it irritated me to no end.

Chain-mail, for me, is a pet-peeve. It puts me in a foul mood for the rest of the day (and since I check my e-mail late at night, that's sort of okay...).

I was introduced to chain-mail right around the same time I started to really get into using e-mail. The entire prospect of international connection through the internet was magical and mysterious, and because you can catch criminals on the internet, I supposed there was some sort of secret, hidden camera watching my every click. So it should be no wonder that I freaked out and annoyed my elder sister to no end when I opened my first chain-mail to find that I was doomed to 7 years of haunting because I hadn't fulfilled the demands of the e-mail (I had yet to learn what "cut-and-paste" was).

Up to a few years ago I obediently catered to the wishes of whatever mysterious and demonic author had typed up the scary e-mail; about little girls that were abused and now hunted her missing head; about how the phone will ring and turn out to be the love of your life(and if you don't continue the chain mail you never will meet the love of your life). I feel slightly idiotic and heavily embarassed, remembering it now, but I have a point to make here.

Out of the myriads of chain-mail I received, I hated the ones that were mystical and warned of ghosts or promised lifelong spiritual rewards, but even more I was spitting with anger at the e-mails that told about the suffering of people; babies with brain cancer who benefited with a cent for every person the e-mail was forwarded to, children in some desolate part of the world who need monetary support...

...and all you have to do is put another name, another detached identity down on the bottom of that long, long list of people who care.

What's the point?

Your e-mail doesn't actually make much of a difference. It just ends up in a few hundred other inboxes along with the other two-hundred and twenty-three names on that same list that begs stop the genocide in Darfur! and nothing really changes.

Forwarding an e-mail is not going to stop MSN from charging you for using MSN Messenger. Copy and pasting a poem will not support the impoverished, tubercular author in Siberia. Who really takes the trouble of noting down your e-mail address? What person in Darfur is safe and comfortable and powerful enough to see that message and do something about the genocide? What person in Siberia is going to get back at that impoverished author who owns nothing but a paraffin stove (How did he get his poem on the internet in the first place?)

Sure, it's nice to see that so many people care about what's happening. But let's get real, shall we? Go sign and forward all the chain-mail you want; but if you believe in the cause and if you can do something about it, then instead of placing your signature on a petition you ought to be placing slogans on posters, putting the trash in the bin, sealing donation envelopes.

If we want a difference made then we better get off our butts and help it happen.

Shall we?