I have egg on my face in a major way!
Today, I received an e-mail from a friend about children of Congressmen not having to pay back student loans. I had just been listening to a local radio program where the speaker was talking about how much it costs to send students to various colleges for four years. The cost is astonishing! Moderate expenses might be $60,000 or so for room and board and tuition. Most private schools are much more expensive than that for four years. The students or their parents are left with huge loans that have to be repaid, and a years worth of some of the payments could be the equivalent of buying a brand new car for cash each year!
At any rate, I read the opening of this e-mail and saw red. I hit forward, added a personal message, and then sent it to almost everyone in my address book. (Those who live outside the US were spared, as were business contacts.)
So, I started to post the message here, and found myself writing “If the item about not having to pay back student loans is true…” I hadn’t checked. Drat! I’m always the one who gently tells friends that they should check with Snopes before sending on rabel-rousing e-mails. So I checked, and sure enough, most of it was false.
I HATE making an error of that magnitude. The only good thing that might come out of it is that I’m bound to hear from a lot of people I haven’t talked with for a while. Of course, they will be writing to tell me that they forwarded it BEFORE they read my mea culpa.
For the record, I think an amendment requiring Congress to operate under the same rules as everyone else in the United States is a good thing. They should be required to participate in Social Security, Medicare, and the health care reforms, and they should earn MODEST pensions based on years of service. If there’s a grassroots movement out there to accomplish this, I’m all for it!
And for the record, I’ll be more careful about what I pass on in the future.
Mea culpa!
Arrrgh!!!
It's just my state of mind!
Hey, you usually don’t do that sort of thing,so it is easily forgiven. I used to get so many misleading emails that I don’t even bother checking most of them anymore before assuming they are false. Even those ones that claim to have been checked against Snopes, usually haven’t been.
And, you did get the correction out before I had even opened the first one, so we can’t really take you to task now, can we?
It’s been so long since I’ve signed in that I had to look up my log-in and password! Anyway, you are forgiven . . . easily since I committed the same error just days ago. It seems we all have our hot buttons. That must be the way these things work.
Bogie, you make a wonderful sister! *G* I usually check things before sending them on, but this must be my hot button. Cop Car sent an email she got four hours later that has a suggestion for the next amendment to the constitution, that laid everything out logically and much less emotionally. I should post that!
Nan, I think I’ve been ticked off by government abuses for some time, so it doesn’t take much to irritate me these days. I’ll have to be more careful about what I send on. I consider myself to be in good company! *G*
Just got this one again from WS’s sister. I responded that this one is not true (easy as it is to believe), with a couple of links to Snopes and Fact check.
I tend to do the same thing, Bogie. I try to be gentle with my friends but steer them toward the habit of checking with Snopes before forwarding mail like this. Too bad I didn’t take my own advice!
And, isn’t it a sad commentary on our attitude concerning Congress (or any other elected leadership), when we WANT to believe that there is just one more example of their misbehavior?