give me a freaking break...

generally, i think it's a good thing that e-mail and technology have made it easier to keep in touch with people and to reconnect with long lost contacts and friends. it's nice to get that message from out of the blue from someone i spent a lot of time with in high school or a classmate from college. but what i absolutely CANNOT STAND is the resulting epidemic of forwarded messages. delete. delete. delete!

however, today i received something from an old high school friend of mine that has got me so infuriated, so enraged, so offended that i have to respond to it, both directly to my friend and on this blog.

the message is all about how we shouldn't trust barack obama because of muslim influences in his background. it's about how obama was sworn in on the qur'an and not the bible. the message is full of capitalized words like MUSLIM, ATHIEST, RADICAL. and the most offensive part of all? it alleges that obama's run for the presidency is the muslim attempt to take over the united states from the inside.

are you kidding me?!?! i'm all for the first amendment, but this looks a lot to me like hate speech. the message attempts to equate islam with terrorism, and that is flat-out unacceptable and hateful.

what the hell is going on in the world? haven't we learned by now what religious persecution does? if you take these messages (and i use the plural because what i received in my inbox is not unique) and replace the word "muslim" with "jew", you end up with something eerily similar to anti-semitic rhetoric in nazi germany. and have we forgotten what happened there?

come on, people -- wise the hell up. who are you to judge?