Badly Written emails

Have you ever received an email from a trusted friend, which had a tag at the end which said you simply had to forward the email to ten other people, if you did, you would be rewarded with riches beyond your wildest dreams, and if you didn't you would have a fate worse than death? Well, my practice has become to read these things, and trash them. I often send an email back to the person who sent it to me with an admonition that if he or she thought their karma was being affected by how they treated these emails, then they probably should not send them to me. The reason I like to read these things is that invariably there is some flaw in the reasoning of the writer, some flaw which gives away the writing for the trash that it is. Something which demonstrates that the story is concocted by a person and not a real event. So, why do people write like this? I think they want to be immortalized by eternally forwarded emails. I read one, which was supposed to be a tear jerker, in which some kids playing a baseball game allowed a mentally retarded child to play, and both teams recognised his limitations and he was allowed to participate. The story was obviously concocted because, if anyone who worked with retarded children know, that concepts such as baseball games are incredibly complex, a child walking onto a field would not have the capacity to understand all the intracacies of the game instantly, I might add, that even a person with normal intelligence, if he had never seen or played in a baseball game might have a problem playing; but, this child "understood" everything about baseball, including his position in right field and his turn at bat and which way to run after he "hit" the ball, simply fabulous, and unbelieveable. Anyone who worked with these children or adults, would have known that someone would have had to assist the child in every aspect of the game, a bogus story. Another one of these that I received, was a story about someone driving a motorcycle at 80 miles an hour, and crashing into a car pulling into traffic, the conclusion was that the driver should not have been talking into a cell phone, and the mangled vehicle was photographed. This was a bogus story too, it would have taken roughly 10 seconds for the bike to go a quarter of a mile. Whether the person driving had his attention on traffic or not, he would very likely have missed the detail of a motorcycle closing on him as fast as it did, it was either a residential area, or a commercial area, and a motorcycle driving at that rate of speed would not have been able to avoid any vehicle slowly pulling into traffic. Another one of those stories was about an 80 year old college student, another tear jerking bogus story, the writer did not write the name of the school, and added that the woman in the story died a year later. The point of this was there was no way to verify the story, and why? Because we are supposed to just blindly forward this crap, well, I refuse. If something is a fun photographic essay, or if something is well written, it does not need a tag imploring me to foreward it. The key information here is the tag, it gives away the poverty of the writing, or whatever is in the body of the email. Another tag which makes me boil, is "if you love our troops forward this". Well, I support the troops, that is not affected by an email I read or forward, or do not forward. If you read this, and if you write crap, then please put me on your do not send list. If you read this and you forward this sort of crap, please do not forward it to me; lastly, if you are like me and believe that your karma is not affected by whether you read or forward an email, then do what I do, kill the crap. Enjoy it for what it is, poorly written prose, look for the errors, that is fun, but do not foist it on the rest of us.