Spam, we were told by many commenters in Paul Hackett's
diary on Monday, bugs people. When the candidate directly asked us to contact everyone we knew to pass the word on about his candidacy, a lot of people balked. You see, it turns out ... we might
annoy people. You know, they might have to hit a delete button if they're not interested. And that's just too ... risky.
My mind, it boggled.
God knows, we don't want to annoy people. I mean, sure, we're up against the most ruthless bunch of autocratic criminals in American governmental history - liars, hypocrites, thieves, corporatists, nutjob religious extremists who'd just as soon see us dead - but hey ... it might annoy people in our email address book to get a message from us asking them to send on a message to anyone they know in Ohio to vote for a terrific candidate.
I have news for a lot of folks here: Taking back our country is going to
annoy the shit out of a huge number of powerful people. I'd kind of taken it for granted until the other night, I guess, that this knowledge was a given. That some of us realized it may some day come to ... oh, serving time in jail for civil disobedience. Or losing a job. Or getting hit over the head with a billy club. Taking part in a picket line or a general strike. Being put on a no-fly list or under surveillance. Or, for some of the braver among us, like Rachel Corrie ... even dying for what we believe in.
But boy, was I wrong. Apparently many of us can't even be called on to do what we do best: Sit on our asses and use the internet. Because, you know ... Aunt Matilda in Batavia might get irritated if she has to spend 1.7 seconds deleting an email she's not interested in. God only knows what dirty looks we'd be risking at Thanksgiving if we asked her to vote for Hackett and pass the word on. That's just too ... out there. Dangerous stuff, this email forwarding. Really on the cutting edge of the revolution. Don't want to take the chance of getting ignored when we ask her to pass the gravy.
That Paul Revere, when he charged through the streets ... what an annoyance. That Rosa Parks, that Martin Luther King Jr., that Gandhi. You'd never catch them forwarding a goddamned email. No sirree. Those people had manners. Vaclav Havel, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, that guy who stood alone in Tienanmen Square in front of the tanks? You think those people would be caught dead putting more than one person on their BCC list? Hell, no. Anti-spammers, every damn one of them.
If I hadn't been feeling so positively hateful that night, I would have found it funny, the way the anti-spammers lived out in real time, in real life, every bloody, godawful, stupid stereotype about the paralysis of liberal elite analysis known to humankind: fetching 500-word definitions of spam and cutting and pasting them, debating into the long, dark hours of the night whether using your whole address book or only selected people in your address book as recipients constituted official spam.
Jesus wept.
To all of you who profess to want change but are unwilling to "spam" acquaintances, I'll make a deal. When it's time to take to the barricades, to hit the street, to put our purported passions on the line, I'll be sure to keep you off my email list reporting the date and time of any revolutionary event. I fucking guarantee it. I want people at my side who are willing to irritate the shit out of this country to get it back. Because friends, I fear it may come down to annoying quite a few people in the end. Get used to it.