A Facebook friend whom I’ve never met but would like to one day sent me one of these You Tube clips that gets zapped around the Internet to sow seeds of discontent.
This particular one showed rail flat car upon flat car of up-armored, desert-painted military trucks. The fear spread by this clip was that these were military personnel carriers FEMA was sending out for a war to disarm Americans. Or something equally as silly. My friend wasn’t making those claims. She was just merely looking for the truth which often gets lost this day and age of Internet conspiracies.
I explained to her how FEMA doesn’t have a black budget to purchase secret weapons plus conspiracy after conspiracy spread around on the emergency agency has repeatedly proven untrue. FEMA may not have done a jam-up job in the wake of the early 21st century hurricanes of the Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas coasts, or perhaps even since. But no one has ever cast one iota of evidence that the agency is building concentration camps for housing the “right-thinking.”
My friend, after my explanation, thanked me for putting her mind a little more at ease.
Why should people fear or embrace or even believe the first thing they see come across in their e-mail or Facebook or Twitter? There is real stuff to get scared about.
The U.S. is moving anti-missile weapons to Guam in case the idiot leader of North Korea decides to launch something. Not that we should particularly be worried about the power of the Peoples Republic forces. We should be concerned about the stupid logic and likely bad counsel received by the young dictator of North Korea. The worry should be that Kim does something stupid ridiculously dangerous. Let’s say he launches a missile towards an island and it hits near Seoul, perhaps even near the thousands of American troops. Even something more benign could result in the flattening of what was North Korea. We should worry for all those innocent folks in North Korea as well as our troops and the Korea they protect across the 38th Parallel.
We should be concerned for the vigilant folks who keep the peace in the homeland. Some folks have decided it is open season on officers of the law. An assistant district prosecutor in Texas, a Colorado prison warden, the assistant DA’s boss who was the district attorney in Kaufman County, Texas, along with his wife, and today a sheriff in West Virginia have all been killed within the last two months. Is there a string there? Maybe. Maybe not. The carnage shouldn’t particularly keep the normal citizen up at night. But all those folks affected by this savagery and those who are paid to prevent it all could use some good thoughts, even prayers if you are so inclined.
Plenty of worry finds us everywhere, it seems, in this Internet age. And it is a time we are more informed than ever that “The British are coming.” Sorry, my Brit friends, just a metaphor or perhaps simile. I won’t say: “Don’t worry. Be happy.” But perhaps, “Don’t sweat that which just as easily could be bullshit. Be happy as you have a right to such happiness.”