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If You Saw It on Facebook, It’s Probably a Lie

People on Facebook love to get all self-righteous. That’s fine by me, as long as the emotion is based on truth. The problem these days is that people are increasingly gullible, accepting memes as gospel when they are in fact bullshit.

Mood music:

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One example is a picture of a letter reported to be written by a U.S. service man claiming, essentially, that Starbucks hates soldiers and won’t let them have their coffee. The letter reads:

Dear everyone: Please pass this along to anyone you know, this needs to get out in the open. Recently Marines over in Iraq supporting this country in OIF wrote to Starbucks because they wanted to let them know how much they liked their coffee and try to score some free coffee grounds. Starbucks wrote back telling the Marines thanks for their support in their business, but that they don’t support the War and anyone in it and that they won’t send them the Coffee.

So as not to offend them we should not support in buying any Starbucks products. As a War vet and writing to you patriots I feel we should get this out in the open. I know this War might not be very popular with some folks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t support the boys on the ground fighting street to street and house to house for what they and I believe is right. If you feel the same as I do then pass this along, or you can discard it and I’ll never know. Thanks very much for your support to me, and I know you’ll all be there again here soon when I deploy once more.

Semper Fidelis, Sgt Howard C. Wright
1st Force Recon Co
1st Plt PLT RTO

The letter is actually not new; Sgt. Wright wrote it in 2004. But I’ve seen it on Facebook a few times in the past week alone, and people are posting it to their profiles with comments about how evil Starbucks is and how they won’t ever buy coffee there. I knew it was bullshit straightaway. I’ve bought a lot of coffee from Starbucks, and I clearly remember its campaign to send coffee to the troops. Customers were given the option of buying coffee by the pound that would then be sent to the front lines.

Back when Sgt. Wright wrote the letter, Starbucks contacted him to clarify its position. He then sent out another email, retracting his above statement:

Dear Readers,
Almost 5 months ago I sent an email to you my faithful friends. I did a wrong thing that needs to be cleared up. I heard by word of mouth about how Starbucks said they didn’t support the war and all. I was having enough of that kind of talk and didn’t do my research properly like I should have. This is not true. Starbucks supports men and women in uniform. They have personally contacted me and I have been sent many copies of their company’s policy on this issue. So I apologize for this quick and wrong letter that I sent out to you. Now I ask that you all pass this email around to everyone you passed the last one to. Thank you very much for understanding about this.

Howard C. Wright, Sgt USMC

The Facebook meme is someone’s rewrite of the letter, with facts changed and no mention of Sgt. Wright’s later retraction:

Facebook meme

This whole thing illustrates a larger problem with Facebook: In our rush to show how morally upright we are, we users fall for just about anything we see. We essentially do what Sgt. Wright did back in 2004, acting on rumors without doing our homework first.

I include myself in this group; I’ve fallen for fraudulent memes in the past as well. It’s a human trait to take shortcuts, and memes are a shortcut. The lesson is that if you see statements of outrage on Facebook, you should research the matter before opining, because what you see is probably a lie.

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My Current State of Mind

Please indulge me as I share my current state of mind with you. Oh, yes, I have all kinds of things floating around in this brain of mine this morning.

Mood music:

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  • I’ve often been asked if the anti-depressants I take have any unpleasant side effects. Not really, but I’ve discovered the hard way that if you don’t chase the pills down with enough liquid and they get stuck in your throat, the result is the worst heartburn you’ll ever experience.
  • Today’s my mother’s birthday, and while we haven’t talked in a long time, I’d like to wish her a happy birthday. Happy birthday, Ma.
  • I loved winter and cold weather as a kid. As I get older, I appreciate the freezing temperatures less and less. March 21 can’t come fast enough, though around here, the cold will last well beyond that. As it stands, I’m having quite a fist-fight with Winter Bill, and I’m getting sore and bloody. All the same, I expect to finish winter still standing.
  • I’m getting increasingly addicted to playing guitar, and I’m not the least bit sorry for it. Truth be told, there are days when guitar practice is the only think keeping me sane. Last night I learned the fine art of hammer ons and pull offs and the intro to Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love.” My head is still spinning. But it beats the hell out of drinking, binge eating and OCD overdrive.

Overall, I’d say I’m doing fine this Friday. Off to face the busy day.

Big Cup of Coffee

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Stop Whining and Learn From Your Pain

In my early 20s, I adored the Pretty Hate Machine and Broken albums from Nine Inch Nails. I still listen to them on occasion, but for the most part I grew tired of them because all Trent Reznor’s screaming about pain, loneliness, depression and rage got old. He never told us how to go from hopelessness to wisdom and personal growth.

Mood music:

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That’s how Kerry Cohen, an author I’ve come to admire, feels about Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation. In her latest Huffington Post blog entry, Cohen explains how important that Wurtzel book was to her at a fragile time in her life:

Wurtzel named a truth for us that psychology wouldn’t touch. We were a generation of depressives, of borderlines, of personality disorders. We were Generation Empty. I loved Wurtzel for how she made me feel less alone, seen.

But Cohen reached an impasse with Wurtzel:

My editor for Loose Girl summed it up when she said, “America loves a redemption story.” We wouldn’t settle anymore for emptiness that goes nowhere. People wanted to know how to get better. … There are times I wish I could call Wurtzel on the phone and tell her how much her work meant to me. … But until she has something new to say, something that is still truly about our generation, I wish she would stop.

I’ve never read Prozac Nation. I haven’t read Cohen’s books in their entirety, either, though I’ve dug into parts of Loose Girl and Seeing Ezra. I’ve mostly become a fan of her work through her blog posts and  what she shares on Facebook and Twitter. This latest post hits my core.

In my early 20s, I reveled in my depression. I filled notebooks full of poetry about my emptiness. I somehow thought it made me cool. I hit upon something that I felt “normal” people couldn’t experience. This somehow made me smarter, better. I was just stupid. I’ve searched everywhere for those notebooks. Not because I think I’ll find some brilliant spark from the past to feed my creativity today, but because I think I’d get some cheap laughs from it.

I remember going on a date in 1989 and spending the whole dinner telling the young lady about how bitter I was toward my parents and how dark I saw the world. That relationship didn’t survive the first date.

Eventually, I realized that the pain wasn’t going to send me anywhere in life unless I used it to gain a better understanding of who I was and what kind of good I was capable of. The ancient Greek scribe Aeschylus described the need to use suffering for personal growth this way:

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart

until, in our own despair, against our will,

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Robert F. Kennedy, who recited that poem to a shocked and angry crowd the day MLK was assassinated, understood all too well.  I’ve tried hard to take those words to heart. In this blog, I’ve tried to always explain how, in my personal experience, things get better. If all I did here was complain, this blog would go nowhere. I must always remember that.

Thanks for the reminder, Kerry.

ProzacNationBook

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One Good Thing About Westboro Baptist Church

The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) hates homosexuals. In fact, its members hate pretty much everybody. When terrible tragedy strikes, they praise it as God’s retribution for all the things they’re against.

Mood music:

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That alone is reason for me to hate them back. But these people take it to even lower levels by picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers. Now they’ve threatened to picket funerals for the tiny victims of Friday’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

But I’m not going to hate them back, because even a filthy group like this serves a purpose.

WBC_20051202_sacco-topeka5

Here’s the one good thing about WBC: Their hateful actions bring out the good in others. They inspire people to take a stand for what’s right.

The best example this week: police, firefighters and others from neighboring states have come to Newtown, Conn., to form massive human walls at the funerals, blocking the Westboro picketers from the mourners’ view.

It goes to show that for every hateful action, there’s a loving reaction to overpower the bad. In this case, the WBC picketers were scared away.

God is good.

wall

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The OCD Diaries in Book Form

Erin and I are making plans for 2013. One is to turn The OCD Diaries into book form.

Mood music:

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Almost since the beginning of this blog, readers have suggested that I do an OCD Diaries book. Flattering as that suggestion is, I sort of balked at the notion. This began as a memoir of sorts, and that might have been worth making a book out of. But the subject matter quickly evolved, and I’ve felt that wrapping the whole thing into one book would be cumbersome to the reader.

But Friday I got an idea: I could do a series of books &mdash smaller, bite-sized works we could make available in print and digital formats. I could set them up to have the feel and reading experience of the Devotionals you see offered in various religious communities. The print editions would be pocket-sized so you could pull ’em out as needed.

So far, we’re planning topics to include:

  • Dealing with OCD, depression and other disorders
  • Living through addiction
  • Dealing with grief
  • Spirituality
  • A survival guide for children and parents
  • A survival guide for relationships
  • Life with Crohn’s Disease and how the related coping tools apply to a multitude of health challenges
  • A book of humor, featuring selections from humor writers I admire

    • The common element tying it all together will be pieces of my back story, what I’ve experienced and how I’ve learned to manage the challenges.

    These will not be books telling you how you should live. I’m the last guy on Earth who should be advising you on that. They will simply be stories of what I’ve done and why, with lots of resource material so you can seek out the professional experts.

    Onward.

    Pile of Books

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Five Takeaways From Election 2012

It’s no surprise to see my friends’ reactions on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. Obama supporters are elated; Romney supporters are bitter.

One person lamented that “things will never be OK again!”

Mood music:

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I feel for those who wanted a different outcome. This election season was particularly heated among friends and family. I saw a lot of relationships tested and damaged. Some were accused of hate speech, bigotry and conspiracy-spinning. That certainly happened in spots. It always does in an election cycle.

But most people simply have beliefs that permeate their souls. They want the best for those around them and personal experience has molded their beliefs on how to get there. They may be right or wrong, but their hearts are in the right place.

There is nothing cynical about that.

Some suggestions for those hurting from the Election 2012 hangover:

  • Don’t waste your time spinning conspiracy theories about the election being stolen from your candidate or the winner having some hidden evil scheme to destroy America. Even in the post 9/11 world, a president’s power to do the things that scare you are limited. We have divided government, something the Founding Fathers built into the system to prevent the consolidation of power in one place. Spinning conspiracy theories won’t do you any good, anyway. It’ll just make you sick.
  • If your candidate won, don’t be an asshole about it. Romney isn’t evil and never was. He just has a different set of beliefs than you do. The shittiest part of this election has been the name-calling. The notion that your friends are subhuman and stupid because they voted differently from you is sad and selfish.  When you see the Romney supporters in your life this morning, give them a pat on the back and buy them a cup of coffee. Don’t rub salt in their wound.
  • If your candidate lost, calling the other side idiots, shitheads and the other names I’ve seen this morning will not make you feel better. You’ll feel worse and look petty and spiteful.
  • Remember that any meaningful, good change in your life starts with you, not the people that get elected. One of my Facebook friends, David Black, put it best when he said, “Whoever is elected president has little to do with how I live my daily life. We have our families, our friends, and our health. What more do we really need? Be of good cheer; this too will pass.” Amen, brother.
  • As an extension of that last point, do the things that will help your community more than any national or state election result ever could: Volunteer to mentor students. Help your friends and families earn a living by helping out with some household task or watching their kids when school is canceled. Drive your elderly neighbor around so they can do their errands and get to doctors’ appointments. Those things that are personal and seem so insignificant in the big picture make the difference for people. Of course, most of you already know that and already do these things. Thanks for all you do.

When I was a young, idealistic punk, I didn’t get a lot of these things. Indeed, I still have plenty of room for improvement. But I’m hopefully a bit wiser.

Blessings to you all.

Obama and Romney

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Stop Thinking You Have the Whole Story

I’m watching a lot of people go apeshit this morning over a restaurant receipt someone posted online. Apparently a single mom was too poor to tip her server on a meal that cost $138.35. Have a look:

Restaurant receipt

Mood music:

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It looks real enough, but I’ve grown skeptical of most online pics these days. It’s easy to fake images these days. But real or not, somebody posted it to get a reaction, so I’ll take the bait.

My first reaction is that this single mom didn’t think things through, and some hard-working waitress got shafted. Surely, if she’s struggling financially, she shouldn’t have gone to a restaurant. She certainly should have aimed cheaper. McDonald’s, for instance. It’s horrible to skip the tip, especially when service is top notch.

That’s what people are saying, anyway.

On that I agree. I always try to leave a tip above the baseline percentage simply because waiting on tables looks like hard work and my kids always leave a mess. The bigger reason, though, is that something inside me wants to do something nice for someone, even if they don’t deserve it. I’ve had plenty of shitty service in my day, but I still left a tip. Have I ever stiffed someone on the tip? I can’t remember, but I’m sure I have.

There’s a bigger point, though. When we see these things online, we instantly assume we’re looking at an accurate, honest picture, and we can’t contain our outrage. I’m certainly guilty of it.

So for the sake of being nicer people, let’s consider some things.

Whenever we see or hear something, we’re only getting a piece of the story. If someone cuts us off in traffic, for example, we’re pretty sure we’ve just suffered at the hands of some asshole with reckless driving habits. What we may not know is that the driver is rushing to the hospital after getting word that a loved one is dying.

If this mom took her kids to a restaurant despite the lack of financial resources, maybe she felt she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she lost power days ago from Superstorm Sandy and all the food in her fridge spoiled.

Maybe she skipped the cheaper restaurants because they had no power either or because one of her kids has allergies that make fast food a dicier proposition.

Maybe she walked in there thinking she had enough money to cover everyone, only to receive a bill that was a lot higher than she expected. I’ve run into that scenario before.

There are other questions for which we lack answers. For example, how many mouths was she trying to feed?

If you’re getting pissed at me for spoiling your moment of self-righteous indignation, I don’t really blame you. Nobody loves wallowing in self-righteous indignation more than me. But ever since I started taking a class on mindfulness-based stress reduction, I’ve been thinking about something the teacher said: “We spend most of our days making judgments, but we never know the entire story.”

Whenever I see all the outrage on Facebook and elsewhere and feel tempted to join in, that statement keeps coming back to me.

It makes it harder for me to get angry.

But then I’ve never been a server in a restaurant, so if I’m not feeling an adequate level of outrage, it’s probably because I don’t have the full story there, either.

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Another ‘Crazy Mike’ Facebook Page? Jerks.

Last year, I found a disgusting Facebook page making fun of someone with a serious mental illness. The site was taken down, but now there’s a new page dedicated to the man locals call Crazy Mike.

I want the creator and those who like the page to know something. By embracing such a page, you are making a much broader statement: either that you don’t understand the suffering a person experiences from mental illness or that you do understand but think it’s perfectly fine to tear down a human being who is seemingly weaker than you are.

Mood music:

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A couple weeks ago, I got an email from someone calling me a scumbag for defending Mike. He scares women and children and should be off the street, the writer told me. What really disgusted him, though, was the idea that Mike is a Vietnam veteran who is sick because of what he experienced there.

More recently, I heard from someone claiming to me Mike’s brother. I have no reason to disbelieve him, but since I haven’t been able to verify it yet, I’ll keep him anonymous. He actually alerted me to the new Facebook page and verified that Mike is a vet.

“Mike is indeed a Vietnam War Vet, serving as a field medic during his tour,” the man wrote. “He was born in May 1950, putting him squarely in that unfortunate group that was drafted or enlisted during the height of the war.”

Now that I’ve captured two different sides, I’ll say this:

  • Whatever his past, the fact is that he’s a human being who suffers from severe mental illness. I tend to believe that he was in Vietnam based on information I’ve received over time from multiple sources. But the reason for his illness isn’t what matters to me. It’s that he is sick and suffering and that people find it OK to make fun of him. It’s not OK.
  • Many people have chimed in about their own run-ins with the man, and I have noticed that some folks feel genuine affection for him. As stupid and sad as it was for people to latch on to a page that simply made fun of Mike (some of the comments on the page are nasty and pathetic), I think most people are decent, have good hearts and mean no harm.
  • I’m no saint. I’ve made my share of fun of people like this, and in the rearview mirror, looking back at my own struggle with mental illness, it makes me feel ashamed. It makes me the last guy on Earth who would be fit to judge others for poking fun at someone less fortunate.

We can do better than this.

True, to those who don’t know him, it can be disconcerting to walk into a store with Mike hanging around outside the door yelling at people. Sometimes, fear is justified. Part of my motivation for this post is to make more of you aware that he’s harmless.

To those who want to haggle over whether Mike was in Vietnam, I’d suggest you stop getting sidetracked and remember that no matter what makes a person sick, they deserve compassion and help, not this bullshit.

The jackass who created the new Facebook page should shut it down. And the hundreds of people who liked it should feel some shame.

Crazy Mike

This post is an update of an early post, “A Final Word on Crazy Mike.”

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I Wish Hard Rock Stations Had More Class

It’s not easy being a rock ’n’ roll fanatic some days, especially when it comes to the choices I have on the radio dial. Oh, don’t get me wrong: The Boston area has plenty of great stations, especially RadioBDC and Rock 101 in Southern New Hampshire.

But some radio stations, in the Boston market and beyond, that play my kind of music have to ruin it by appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Mood music:

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It’s always been this way, of course, and once upon a time I didn’t mind. One of my local stations, WAAF, has cranked up a humor based on sexual crassness for as long as I can remember. Hell, this is the station that brought us shock jocks Opie and Anthony. They shocked Boston until April 1998 they told their listeners as an April Fools’ prank that Boston Mayor Tom Menino was killed in a car accident while transporting a young female Haitian prostitute. In more recent years, I’ve tuned in to hear women on the morning show being asked about the shape of their vaginas.

As a 20 year old, I loved this stuff. But somewhere along the way I grew up, and my radio stations didn’t. (The RadioBDC DJs, formerly of WFNX, have always been more mature in this regard.)

It’s a drag for two reasons:

  • I can’t listen when my kids are in the car, which is most of the time.
  • Thanks to the Internet and, more specifically, Facebook, I have to see a lot of meathead comments from WAAF and its followers. This morning, for example, WAAF posted these comments above pictures of the women they talk about:
    • “Here’s math teacher Iowa Ashley Nicole Anderson who allegedly had relationships with FOUR different students! Would you??”
    • “Here’s Mandy Caruso, the cosplayer dressed as “Black Cat” who was upset about being sexually harrassed at NY ComicCon.”

The comments to the latter post have a few mature comments, but most of them are abusive name-calling. One jerk calls her a “cumdumpster” and someone else asks, “What does she expect when she looks like that?” Forget that these women are human beings, prone to all the mistakes we’re all prone to. The woman in the latter case did nothing wrong. She was at a comic book convention and was in costume. That doesn’t give some asshat the right to ask about her cup size.

I’m no prude. I do come from Revere, after all, and have been known to swear like a sailor. When my sons let the bathroom humor flow, I admit I laugh inside even as I’m scolding them.

But there are lines I’ve decided not to cross anymore. I want my rock ’n’ roll delivered to me by DJs whose thinking and sense of humor are something above the Stone Age stuff.

I’ve unliked the WAAF Facebook page and don’t plan to listen to the station again anytime soon.

Thankfully, I have RadioBDC and, when I want to cut out all the talking, Spotify.

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Lance Armstrong Was Robbed

I just saw a report that Lance Armstrong is stepping down as chairman of the Livestrong charity he built to inspire and empower cancer sufferers. It comes after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency reported “overwhelming evidence” that Armstrong engaged in doping while he was a professional cyclist.

Armstrong was robbed.

Mood music:

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Much has been made of doping in professional sports. Frankly, I couldn’t care less if athletes use steroids. So what? The media acts like it’s a new thing in professional sports, when the reality is that some form of drug enhancement has been going on in the profession longer than I’ve been alive. To be the athlete that inspires millions, you need a raw talent and drive that most people could only hope to have. Dope all you want. If you don’t have the talent and determination to begin with, you’re going nowhere.

Armstrong’s case is particularly sad. Here is a man who overcame testicular cancer that spread to his lungs and brain and then won the Tour de France seven times. He became a hero in the eyes of millions and that helped turn his Livestrong foundation into one of the biggest cancer-fighting charities in the country.

As far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t a hero because he won the Tour de France. He was a hero simply because he went the distance multiple times in that brutal competition. Had he come in 10th place, he still would have been a hero to me, because he overcame a deadly disease and showed sufferers everywhere that physical limitations need not stop them from living out their dreams.

People say steroids gave him an unfair advantage. I say the damage his body suffered from cancer put him at a huge disadvantage going in.

The doping controversy is bullshit. It was the creation of politicians that wanted something to grandstand over. Go ahead and disagree.

Some people I admire are fighting cancer right now, and because of the money raised by Livestrong they have better odds than they would have 10 or 15 years ago.

I agree with Forbes writer Chris Smith that it’s time to legalize steroids in professional sports. He writes:

If we really want to level the playing field, it may be time to head in the other direction: legalize performance enhancers.

Not only would the playing field suddenly be even for all players, it would be at a higher level. A huge part of watching sports is witnessing the very peak of human athletic ability, and legalizing performance enhancing drugs would only help athletes climb even higher. Steroids and doping will help pitchers to throw harder, home runs to go further, cyclists to charge for longer and sprinters to test the very limits of human speed. …

Detractors will argue that steroids and doping can pose health risks to the athletes involved, but athletes undertake serious health risks by simply walking onto the field or straddling a bike. Just last year, a media car ran Johnny Hoogerland off the road during the Tour de France, sending him headlong into barbed wire. Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann famously had his leg broken and career ended mid-game, and the devastating longterm effects of concussions are rapidly becoming apparent. Plus, if performance enhancers were made legal, then they could be safely distributed and regulated so that players aren’t forced to rely on shady back alley transactions for untested drugs.

We love to make heroes out of people who do big things. Unfortunately, we love to tear them down, too. Armstrong has done so much good for a lot of people. This whole affair is a shitty way to repay him.

Lance Armstrong