Too Bad to Be True? It Probably Isn't

Fake political emails have been especially plentiful for the past few months. I’ve received a video email a few times recently supposedly showing President Obama being snubbed by the Russians. False. I’ve received an email stating that Canada thinks President Obama is a failure, and another describing Mrs. Obama is an over-indulged princess. Also false. The Canada Free Press, an ultra-conservative Canadian newsletter, was being passed off as the legitimate news agency of Canada, like our Associated Press. And besides, both stories were written by Americans.

Several months ago there was a fabricated email story circulating—with a copy of the so-called bill—that Mrs. Obama had a very expensive brunch at a posh hotel in New York when she wasn’t there. The publisher printed a retraction, but didn’t forward it to me. I had to track it down on my own.

There was yet another email story zooming around cyberspace stating that a doctor of philosophy wrote a dissertation on Mr. Obama’s narcissism. While that author did comment about Obama possibly being a narcissist, the poor author was erroneously credited with a hate-filled article published on a secularist website and written by an ex-Muslim using a pseudonym. That author was so hateful I left his website as soon as I could for fear of being infected.

Why do we forward and circulate so much misinformation and even hatred? Partly, of course, because we can. In years past, who would have driven to the local copy center to make multiple copies of a hand-written or typed letter stating their reasons for hating someone? And then filled and addressed dozens of envelopes, affixed dozens of postage stamps, and slipped them into a U.S. postal mailbox for distribution? And if they did, what would we think about them? Hello? Does the name Unabomber ring a bell? As I said, we forward this “stuff” because we can, because it’s free and so easy to do. And yes, of course I’ve done it also.

“People say believe half of what you see, son, and none of what you hear." I Heard it Through the Grapevine, Marvin Gaye

With today’s amazing, readily available computer software, it’s no longer safe to believe “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Still photos, videos and voice recordings can and are routinely altered to sell something or make a point. There are probably tens of thousands of good people out there who believe that photo of a gun-totin,’ bikini-clad Sarah Palin was real. It wasn't. The photo was digitally altered. You knew that too, right?

And why is it necessary to paint Mrs. Palin as a sexy, gun-happy, beauty queen? Why is it necessary to paint Hillary Clinton as a shrewish, man-eating, ball-busting harpy? Right now some of us are saying, “Because they are,” aren’t we?

“Check it out.” John Mellencamp

How do we stop the proliferation of these WMD’s (weapons of mass deception)? Here’s my plan. Add our government representatives’ email addresses to our email contacts. If, after checking truthorfiction.com, urbanlegends.about.com, and snopes.com, we find an email story is indeed true and we object to its message, we can forward it to our Senators and Representatives and tell them this news really pisses us off. We can even insist they do something about it. Then when those angry, and yes, sometimes funny emails show up, it will be as easy to make our voices heard by our government as it is to hit the “forward” command and entertain our friends.

Donna

Next Week: Are we still supposed to shave our legs if we only have twelve hairs left on them? Laugh—it’s good for us!

Camping With Women, Chapter 4

“What have you been up to for the past decade?” my old friend Francine wanted to know. We hadn’t talked in years when she telephoned out of the blue one day. I described a life of PTA meetings, youth baseball games, band boosters, Scout meetings and campouts. She’d had a much different life with two more divorces to add to her previous two, plus she’d been struck by lightning. Her life definitely held more drama than mine.

“Do you like camping?” she wanted to know.

“I love camping! I teach it to new Boy Scouts and their parents.”

“I go to Yosemite every summer and I always take friends,” she continued. “You wanna go with me next July?” She offered to make the reservations and outfit the entire trip; we could split the costs. I’d never been to Yosemite and it sounded like a wonderful opportunity to me.

The Control Freak: Francine

“Do you like to ride horses?” Francine asked.

“I did before my knee problems,” I replied. I had dislocated my knee twenty-five years earlier, and it had been temperamental the past several years. “The last time I rode a horse my knee gave out on me and it took two grown men to peel me off the creature. I still get embarrassed when I think about it.”

“Oh well, you can ride a little bit,” she insisted.

“I really don’t think so. Don’t plan on it.” I thought I’d convinced her. “I’d like to do some hiking while we’re there, though.”

We talked on the phone regularly, going over plans and details for the trip. When the day came, I flew to Sacramento and Francine picked me up in a well-maintained, older model white pickup truck with an over-sized, two horse trailer in tow. There were two very exuberant black labs in the crew cab’s front seat with her. “Say hi to Donna, kids,” she said to the two dogs. “This is Angie and this is Bruno,” she announced, caressing and kissing each one on the nose as she said their names.

“You decided to bring the dogs and the horses. Great!" I tried to sound enthusiastic. The dogs retreated behind the front seat and I climbed into the truck. As the two animals sniffed and checked me over, I told myself to be a good sport about the saliva on my head, neck and back.

“Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.” Don Williams, Jr.

We left Sacramento Airport and set out on our one hundred seventy-five mile (or so) drive to Yosemite. As we climbed through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the truck labored to keep up with traffic. The old pickup was dragging about three thousand pounds of trailer, a couple thousand pounds of Arabian horses, and probably another 1000 pounds or more of food, gear, and passengers. By the time we were in the real mountains the truck was slowing to the point of becoming a road hazard.

We had cars and trucks backed up behind us as far as we could see—and hear. The angry drivers blasted us with their horns. Francine would have pulled off the highway more often if she could have. The twisting mountain road had very few “turn-outs,” and they were seldom designed so that she could prepare to stop far enough in advance that she didn’t jackknife the trailer. When she was able to pull over to the side of the road, dozens of driver’s would tear past us, sometimes with their arms raised in one-finger salutes; sometimes shouting that we were “stupid bitches” and worse.

“They’d call us gypsies, tramps, and thieves.” Cher

That July Yosemite was so booked that the horses had to be moved from stable to stable, and we had to pick up stakes every night and move from campsite to campsite like gypsies. Francine was annoyed that I wouldn't go horseback riding. Morning and night we took care of the horses and the dogs, and the dogs were always with us. If we stopped somewhere to eat or sightsee, our time was limited by how long Angie and Bruno could remain alone in the truck.

Francine treated me like a novice camper. When I cooked, she told me how I could have done it better. When I set up my tent, she repositioned my tent stakes. Whatever the issue, whatever the discussion, she always had the last word. She retied my hitches when we were tending to the horses. “I teach knots and hitches to Boy Scouts,” I told her.

“My hitch is better!” she said. Each day I found it harder and harder to be a happy camper.

“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.” Confucius

For three days she wore the same baby doll cotton blouse. It was dotted liberally with big black boogers from her sneezing horses. I didn’t say anything about the blouse until day three when we were planning to have dinner at the beautiful old Wawona Hotel restaurant. “Francine, we are going to dress up a little for dinner, right?” So far, shorts and tee shirts had been my daily uniform.

“We’re fine dressed the way we are,” she said.

“Well, you are going to change that blouse, aren’t you? It’s covered with horse snot.”

“There’s nothing more beautiful than horse boogies,” she argued. Finally, at my insistence, she changed the blouse in the parking lot of the hotel just before we went in for dinner.

On the last morning when we were leaving Yosemite to head back to Sacramento, I was up long before dawn, breaking down my tent and packing up the gear. When she woke up I was sitting on my camp chair, completely packed and ready to load up the truck. “You’re the most competent person I’ve ever brought up here,” she said, looking over the packs. All I wanted to do was get on an airplane heading back to Texas.

“He who would travel happily must travel light.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Francine called a few days later and asked if I wanted to camp with her again the following summer. “I don’t think so,” I told her. “Look, I really appreciate all you did to set up this trip, but the horses and the dogs—it was all too Lewis and Clark for me. I’m more a Johnny Appleseed kinda camper. Let’s just be friends without camping together.” I haven’t heard from her since.

Donna

Camping With Women, Chapter 3

There was so much hazing and bullying in Robert’s first Boy Scout troop that he began to think if he was going to live to make Eagle Scout, he’d better find another troop. He chose a troop in Southlake, Texas—Forbes magazine’s 2008 richest community in the nation. The boys in the Southlake troop could have paid bullies to do their hazing for them. I always half expected sherpas to show up when we went camping so the boys wouldn’t have to carry their own backpacks. There was no such thing as hazing in the Southlake troop. If a boy misbehaved on a campout, his parents were expected to jump in their Hummer and collect their son and take him home.

Nights in Green Canvas: Joan

The new troop was a good one with good kids; Robert could now focus more on advancement and less on avoiding injury. I signed up for the troop committee once again, and after more leadership training, the troop appointed me assistant scoutmaster. Then it was off to Wood Badge, an advanced Boy Scout adult leadership training program.

There were about fifty of us in my Wood Badge class, and our first meeting was held in a classroom at Scout headquarters. I was chatting with the person on my right when a very short, very round woman wearing over-sized glasses slid into the seat on my left. Her head appeared to be attached directly to her torso, giving her the appearance of a chickadee with long, straight blond hair. Her name was Joan, and when I turned to say hello, she snapped at me for taking too long to greet her. “It’s a big class,” I thought to myself. “I probably won’t have too much contact with her.”

Mi casa es su casa.

Upon arrival at Sid Richardson Scout Ranch, where the rest of our course took place, we were divided into teams of six, called “patrols.” (Cub Scouts have dens; Boy Scouts have patrols.) Joan and I were, of course, assigned to the same patrol. The four men on our team seemed like great guys, and I vowed to make the best of it and have fun in the training program.

Our patrol was assigned a campsite in the woods, with tent positions marked by wooden platforms resembling shipping palettes. These served as the floors of our green canvas homes-away-from-home. Each tent and its poles and ropes were in a pile near a palette, and the six of us worked as a team to erect our three tents. Seeking to break the ice with Joan, I tried to engage her in small talk while we worked. It worried me that my snoring might make things even less hospitable between us, so I asked her if she by chance snored also; she said “yes.” In a sudden impulse, I gave her a big hug, causing her to stiffen like a clothing store mannequin. “OK,” I thought. “Not a hugger.”

“It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark.” Michael Jackson

After dinner, classes, and a patrol meeting, it was finally bedtime, or rather “cot-time,” and I drifted into a deep, exhausted sleep. Around 3:00 AM, I was startled awake. There was an animal, apparently right outside the tent, and it sounded big, loud, and very angry. I lay paralyzed on my cot, my heart pounding. I didn’t think it could be a bear in that part of Texas, but I knew it might be a cougar or a coyote. I listened for a few moments to the snarling beast until I realized it was Joan. I don’t know if she was snoring or dreaming, but she roared, growled, and snarled in her sleep.

I never did get back to sleep that night. Just before dawn I got up to put the coffee on the camp stove and use the latrine. I returned to the tent where Joan was up and getting dressed in the dark. I waited outside the tent to allow her time to finish dressing and reentered the tent when she left for the latrine.

The tent reeked. “Whew!” I thought to myself. “Some poor creature must be dead under the tent floor. It must have gone bad rather quickly or we would have smelled it when we set up the tent.” I directed my flashlight around the tent floor to see if I could discover where the poor rotting creature had died. The smell was emanating from a very used women’s hygiene pad lying on Joan’s cot. I didn’t sleep the next four nights either.

“Not gonna do it.” George H.W. Bush

On the last night of our last weekend of training, the course required that each patrol backpack into and sleep out in the woods as a final team test. At our patrol’s planning meeting Joan announced she didn’t want the additional weight of a tent in her backpack, and asked me to share my barely-big-enough-for-me solo tent with her. I know the Scout Law states a Scout should be friendly, courteous, kind, and helpful, but the idea of snuggling into a little three-by-six-foot nylon cocoon with her still gives me nightmares. I took Nancy Reagan’s advice and just said “no.”

Donna

Next: The Control Freak

Camping With Women, Chapter 2

Linda, one of two moms I wrote about in an earlier post about Scouts, was a marvel, (If No One Else Volunteers, April 29, 2009). She had two boys, one older and one younger than my son, and she was immersed in Scouting, volunteering on every level. If you could catch up with her to ask for help with almost anything, her answer was always: “sure.”

Miss Congeniality: Linda

Her older son moved from Cub Scouts up to Boy Scouts a year before my son Robert did, and Linda was already a leader when Robert joined the same troop. As chairman of the troop committee, she led the adult group responsible for the troop’s operations and finances and conducted the monthly committee meetings. She was also a merit badge counselor, a trained adult lifeguard, and a fundraising organizer.

Linda suggested I join the troop committee and get involved. Like many parents, I thought Boy Scouts was for boys and their dads. I’d often heard moms say, “I’ll get him through Cub Scouts, then it’s his dad’s turn!” Back in Cub Scouts, I’d heard dads say, “I’ll get involved when he joins Boy Scouts.” Consequently, Boy Scouts was thought to be “no-woman’s land” by many parents, me included. In reality, more and more moms are getting involved in Scouting annually.

Boys will be boys.

Boy Scouts of America has banned any form of hazing; however at Robert’s first troop meeting, the older scouts hung the new scouts upside down over the second floor balcony of the church where they met. “Boys will be boys!” The “good-old-dads” in the troop responded. As Committee Chair, Linda led the fight against those outdated, outlawed attitudes and made several male enemies in the process.

After the hazing incident, my husband Jim and I decided one of us should volunteer to chaperone Robert’s first campout with his new troop. Jim had to work, so I signed up to drive a car full of new Boy Scouts to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to camp at the Vicksburg National Military Park. The scoutmaster informed us that it was rare for anyone to be allowed to camp there and it was a real privilege for our troop to gain permission.

Field of extremes.

After arriving at the national park, a dusty, single-lane gravel road took us through deep woods and past unmown fields to our remote, “primitive” campsite—a clearing about the size of half a football field with two-foot tall weeds, ticks, and no latrines. The boys set up their tents on one side of the field and the adults set up on the other side, rather like the blue and the grey armies had done one hundred thirty-five years earlier.

There were two other moms on the trip—Linda and a tall, younger woman named Karen. At the first opportunity I asked Linda what we were to do about “going to the bathroom.” The boys had no inhibitions about stepping out behind their tents with a spade and a wad of toilet paper when nature called, but we moms weren’t so free spirited. Linda, Karen and I came up with a plan to ensure privacy and discretion; but the three of us needed to always go together for it to work.

Over hill, over dale.

The tree-lined road that led into our campsite ran up and down several small hills and valleys. Our plan was to head down the road a short distance, past a hill or two. One of us could squat alongside the road in a hollow while the other two were posted atop a hill on either side to act as lookouts. Since there was no other traffic on the road that wound through our campsite, it worked well for two days and nights.

One afternoon Linda had one of those moments when it’s time to go now and set out alone. Karen and I saw Linda leave but didn’t worry because no one else was camping in the area. Besides, our boys were busy in camp making their lunches. There was however, unknown to us, park maintenance in progress. While squatting alone in the grass beside the road, with her scout shorts around her ankles and her bare behind cooling in the breeze, Linda watched a huge transport truck full of shirtless, very amused road crews roar past.

Karen and I were horrified when we saw the truck full of laughing men drive through our camp and disappear around a bend. Linda came strolling back after a few minutes and Karen and I ran to meet her.

“Please tell us they did NOT see you squatting when they drove by,” I said.

“Yup,” replied Linda, nodding. “They did.”

“What did you do,” we wanted to know.

“Well, the Scout Law says ‘A Scout is Friendly.’ What else could I do? I smiled and waved,” she said, demonstrating with a big grin and a wave of her arm.

Donna

In memory of Linda Abel, who passed away in June of 2006 at age 59, from brain cancer.