Uninformed or Ignorant?

Are you sick and tired of receiving emails consisting of propaganda based on lies? Would you like a way to respond that might make those who send them consider what they're saying about themselves? If so, you might find this useful.

Yesterday:
A relative sent me an email attacking President Obama with the typical, right-wing regurgitation of lies dating back to 2007, all of which had been debunked long ago, and I responded as follows.

Are you really so ignorant of how easy it is to check the emails you receive for accuracy, or is it your Rush Limbaugh-dictated hatred of President Obama, that allows you to blindly forward lies which have been debunked, and do it with a clear conscience?

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/stance.asp 

I won't hold my breath waiting for you to tell me you sent this email to the bigot whose hate-mongering post you sent to me or that you sent a retraction to all the others to whom you forwarded it without bothering to check whether or not it was true.

Today:
I received a post from a blog to which I subscribe (below). Seeing that it expressed precisely the message I wanted to convey to my relative, but which did so in more gracious terms, I forwarded it to him with this introduction:

Consider this blog post from marketing guru, Seth Godin, to be a followup to my reply to the hate-mongering, lie-infested email you recently sent to me.

Godin's observations make it clear that you have a choice as to how you are seen by those to whom you send such third-party emails...that is, if you care. 

Uninformed or ignorant? 

Uninformed is a temporary condition, fixed more easily than ever. 

Ignorant, on the other hand, is the dangerous situation where someone making a decision is uninformed and either doesn't know or doesn't care about his lack of knowledge. 

The internet lets us become informed, if we only are willing to put in the time and the effort. That's new--the ability to easily and confidently look it up, learn about it, process it and publish to see if you got it right. 

Alas, the internet also creates an environment where it's possible to feel just fine about being ignorant. It's easier than ever to live in a silo where we are surrounded by others who think it's just great to not know. 

"Ignorant" used to be a fairly vague epithet, one that we often misused to describe someone who disagreed with us. Today, because it represents a choice, the intentional act of not-knowing, I think it carries a lot more weight. 

The more I think about this, the more I'm aware of just how ignorant I've chosen to be. Not a happy thought, but a useful wake-up call.

A Recommendation:
Save the link to Uninformed or ignorant? and send it to anyone who forwards political manure packaged as patriotism. Write your own introduction, or feel free to modify the one I wrote to fit your situation.