Why Email chain letters don’t work.

I received an interesting Email a few minutes ago and decided to take a break from work to address something I see very often that encourages other people to take time out of their busy day to forward Emails that make little or no impact whatsoever.

The Email was basically saying “If I have to take a urine test in order to get a job to pay taxes into a system that hands that money to people on social assistance, shouldn’t those people on social assistance be required to take a urine test to qualify to receive the benefit?”

In theory, it sounds like a really excellent practice — if I have to jump through hoops to get a job, then you should have to jump through similar hoops to gain the benefit of having the government help you out because you’re not capable of working yourself at the moment.

The Email ended with:

Pass this along if you agree or simply delete if you don’t.� Hope you all will pass it along, though. Something has to change in this country and soon!!!

Wouldn’t it make more sense to petition our state government instead of just passing around an Email though? Passing around an Email doesn’t do anything at all other than to share an idea with our family and friends. Of course, most of the “pass this around to everyone” Emails that I get are more to share and spread the ideas of racial intolerance here in the USA/Canada, which annoys the crap out of me.

Now, granted that I’m a Canadian citizen living in the USA, and yeah, I immigrated LEGALLY (thank you very much — if I can do it, so can YOU), and while I’m not an expert on American culture or politics, I’m pretty sure the US constitution allows us to petition our government to make changes when we see something that needs change.

I get a lot of these kinds of Emails though, saying “If you want to make a change, Email this to everyone you know,” but the only impact is has is clogging up Email servers around the world. The difference is in speaking out to people that can make these wishes a reality.

Case in point: There was a big tech news blowup this spring/summer when the recording industry was going to raise the prices for playing music over the Internet, which meant that all Internet-based radio stations that streamed music and doing so for barely any cost per song, were going to be subject to three times the cost which meant most of them would be out of business overnight. Obviously the tech community revolted and people started sending out mass Emails saying “If you don’t agree, here’s a web site where you can get the Email address for your congressional representative, and here’s a form letter you can cut and paste in the Email.” Someone even built a very simple web page where all you needed to do was pick your state, type in your name, address and Email address, and click submit to automatically send the letter to your state’s congressional rep. It made a lot more sense, and within a few weeks as I understand it, the change was reversed and the recording industry backed down from raising the prices because of this intervention.

Of course, I wouldn’t begin to know who to contact here in the US to make something like this “urine test” idea stick (would it be state-based, or federal?), but I do agree with the idea, because I’m tired of paying taxes to have some lazy person sit at home and watch TV while I work to pay their cable bill. But that doesn’t mean I’m just going to blindly send an Email to everyone in my address book (in fact, I rarely if ever pass along those sorts of chain Emails).

In Canada, the government adopted a plan a few years back that you could only be on social assistance for a maximum of two years and then you had to be “gainfully employed” for a minimum period of time (to pay back into the system) before you could reapply for the social assistance (welfare) payments. It worked like a charm… people started getting back to work because they HAD to, people woke up and recognized that they could no longer just leech off the system, and it made a total impact.

There were families at a church I attended that, to my knowledge, were second generation welfare recipients. The kids grew up seeing the parents sit around and watch TV all day, so why should they bother with an education to make their life any better? Their parents made $25,000/year or so for doing nothing, so why flip burgers for $15,000/year. All it took was enough of a majority to put pressure on the gov’t to make the change a reality. Now people are more likely to go out and go back to school to get an education (or even just to finish high school), and better themselves because the government no longer hands out freebies.

So here’s my suggestion: if you’re going to pass along a politically-charged “wishful thinking” Email, take a moment, look up the Email address for the congressional representative in your state (or the web site where all Email addresses can be found), and write a form letter we can all copy and paste and send to our congressional rep, before you just send everyone a copy of the Email.

That would make SO much more sense, wouldn’t it?