Myths and truth

  • An acquain­tance of mine is a ser­ial e-mailer. I’m guess­ing that every­one has at least one of those in your life, and women seem to col­lect more of them than men. These are the peo­ple that pass on the occa­sional joke or Let­ter­man list or series of wacky pho­tos of kit­ties that fell asleep in their food. And they send thoughts and expres­sions, which are some­times good for a grin, though I could live with­out the ani­mated emoti­cons, which I find curi­ously annoying.

    But worst of all, they for­ward massively-reproduced e-mails that are struc­tured to require a response. A new com­puter virus is com­ing. A lawyer in San Anto­nio is going to insist on Satanic rit­u­als being per­formed at the post office. A tiny, tiny child said just the most pre­cious thing to her neu­ro­sur­geon before her del­i­cate brain-spanking pro­ce­dure. The Ford Motor Com­pany will give you $30,000 for every sin­gle per­son you irri­tate by send­ing an e-mail to.

    And today, … it was a fast-breaking story about an inspi­ra­tional speech given by Dar­rell Scott, father of a vic­tim of the shoot­ings at Columbine High School, to a spe­cial ses­sion of Con­gress. And when I say “fast-breaking,” of course I mean that this is a six-year-old internet-generated story about a seven-year-old event. Not exactly a hoax, since Mr. Scott actu­ally did give the speech to a small group of sub-committie mem­bers a month after the 1999 shoot­ings. But cer­tainly not a news­flash, and also not some­thing that the media and Con­gress moved to quash, as sug­gested in the inflam­ma­tory pre­am­ble of the e-mail.

    You can read about it here, as I wish my friend would’ve done. I have told her a few times that a one-minute search on snopes.com will usu­ally tell you where you stand with those e-mails that demand a response. But I’ve found that sug­gest­ing to a ser­ial e-mailer that they check the facts meets with a cool polite­ness, and the news that they’re help­ing keep­ing an inter­net hoax alive makes them mad. So do they pre­fer the myth, or do they just begrudge me any course cor­rec­tions because it impugns their sta­tus as Pur­veyor of Folk Wisdom?

    I’m over­think­ing, of course, since the truth is that it’s prob­a­bly just a minor impulse in any case.

    Still, as I was read­ing through the accu­rate story of Mr. Scott’s speech, I mulled over how odd our pref­er­ence for a myth over the truth is some­times. It’s a good speech; there’s lots there for Chris­tians to agree with. Does it need the brightly-colored icing of a shocked Con­gress and a cen­sur­ing media to com­mu­ni­cate that?

    Or con­sider the other myth that came out of Columbine — the myth that one of the girls who was killed — Cassie Bernall — was asked by her assailant if she believed in God and shot to death when she answered “yes.”

    What actu­ally hap­pened is prob­a­bly more dis­turb­ing than that, because even the minor act of Chris­t­ian wit­ness and hero­ism is miss­ing. Salon car­ried the story in Sep­tem­ber of 1999:

    As the Rocky Moun­tain News reported Sept. 24, [Emily] Wyant and [Cassie] Bernall were study­ing alone together in the back of the library. After the gun­men rushed in, the girls crouched beneath a table together, and Cassie began pray­ing aloud: “Dear God. Dear God. Why is this hap­pen­ing? I just want to go home.” Dylan Kle­bold sud­denly slammed his hand on the table, yelled “Peek­a­boo,” and looked under­neath. He shot Cassie with­out exchang­ing a word. …

    [Valerie] Schnurr was down on her hands and knees bleed­ing, already hit by 34 shot­gun pel­lets, when one of the killers approached her. She was say­ing, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, don’t let me die,” and he asked her if she believed in God. She said yes; he asked why. “Because I believe and my par­ents brought me up that way,” she said. He reloaded, but didn’t shoot again. She crawled away.

    The way the story with Cassie Bernall prob­a­bly got started was that another stu­dent in the library, Craig Scott (son of Dar­rell Scott who gave the speech in Con­gress, inter­est­ingly enough), heard the exchange of “Do you believe in God?”, “Yes” and thought it was Cassie talking.

    I’m not talk­ing about this because it’s ter­ri­bly impor­tant that every­one get this right seven years later. I guess I’m talk­ing about it because it makes you real­ize what a frag­ile thing the truth is some­how. It’s so much eas­ier for strong-sounding rhetoric to make the facts seem irrel­e­vant. I’m hop­ing that’s why those silly inter­net ser­ial e-mails bother me so much. We’re all try­ing to get at the truth. Tire­some fab­ri­ca­tions don’t help, and by wear­ing down your crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties, they do some harm.


    Related posts:

    1. Heck­uva speech going on
    2. When no one was look­ing, Cindy Shee­han went com­pletely mad
    3. Roman­ian exorcism
    4. Two wolves

    April 5th, 2006 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 04.05.2006

    Ah yes, I have more than one in my life too. Some­times I just want my siggy to be “did you check on Snopes??????” but I’m not that passive-agressive. Grin.

    I enjoyed your thoughts on the Columbine story as well as on what his­tory is, and how truth becomes truth.

  • Grace

    Yep, no one seems to escape. Well, no one female, at least. My hus­band didn’t know what I was talk­ing about, so it’s sort of a “girl thing,” I guess.

    Look­ing through things on Snopes can become infec­tious. And you stop a lot of times and won­der if things get so dis­torted on pur­pose or acci­den­tally. They’re just lit­tle silly urban leg­ends, but the dynamic seems like a con­stant in our lives, and with so much infor­ma­tion com­ing at us every day, it’d be great to develop a real instinct about these things.

  • Mimi

    When I was in col­lege, I did some stud­ies on Folk­lore. And, now, 10+ years later, my 15 year old just did a paper on Urban Leg­ends. He did a great job of explor­ing how they are folk­loric in ori­gin. It was an “a-ha” moment for me.

  • Grace

    Wow. Smart 15-year-old! :-)

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