Practically everyone who owns or has access to a computer have received urgent email messages advising us either of some great "scam" being worked on the public and telling us what to do to avoid it OR telling us how we can make some quick easy money with little effort required on our part at all.

The one that has been around for a long time is adding your cell phone number to the "do not call" list because telemarketers have been given access to all cell phone directories in the United States and will begin deluging our cell phones with sales pitches any day now.

Of course, there is no national cell phone directory; in fact there are no cell phone directories, per se, at all. You certainly could add your cell phone number to the "do not call" list if you wanted to but there's not much point to it.

 

Another message it seems everyone falls for is the e-mail telling us that Bill Gates is beta testing his new e-mail tracking software and if you will forward the message to everyone you know, you will receive $1,000. This one should be easy to spot but, because of the greed that lurks in so many of us, it appears not to be. I get almost as many of these as I do the one about the cell phone directory. You won't receive any money from Bill Gates, regardless of how many people you forward this message to.

 

Then there are the conservative "rants" attributed to liberal celebrities like George Carlin's "Hurricane Rules" which blames the victims of Hurricane Katrina for not taking responsibility for themselves. Carlin didn't write it. Another one attributed to him is one named "I'm a Bad American." He didn't write that one either.

Another popular rant making the rounds is one allegedly written by Andy Rooney, the social commentator on "60 Minutes," that is anti politically-correct and racist to boot. Rooney didn't write it.

 

What is it about us that makes us believe these things that show up on our computer? What's in our psyche that we not only believe them, but forward them to everyone else we know as quickly as we can without doing any fact-checking for ourselves, especially when it's such an easy thing to do? Every false story and misquoted story can be easily verified or debunked by going to urbanlegends.com.

This Web site has a listing of practically everything of this nature circulating on the web. All you have to do is type in a person's name or the heading of the email you received and the web site will take you directly to the item or person you typed in and will tell you whether the story is true or false. But most people don't do this. If these bogus emails strike a chord with us, most of us will believe what we read and send it on to everyone we can think of. Why do we do this?

 

The answer is neither complicated or complex. In fact, the answer lies in a phrase in the above paragraph; "if these bogus emails strike a chord with us." We know what we believe and we know what we think and we're always looking for confirmation of our own thoughts and ideas, especially if that confirmation comes from people or places we wouldn't expect, like someone with different political or social philosophies.

We're also greedy, that's why we get sucked in by the "free money" email about Bill Gates beta testing system. Many of us are fearful of "big brother" taking more and more control of our lives, that's why we succumb to the cell-phone scam. In other words, these bogus e-mails play to our weaknesses whatever they may be. We believe those things we want to believe.

This practice has been occurring long before emails and long before the computer. Back then it was simply called gossip. We all know in our hearts that gossip takes on a life of its own and every time a story is told, it is embellished a little bit from the previous telling. But if that piece of gossip strikes a chord with us; if it's about someone we don't like or even someone we think we don't want to like, we pass it along without doing any fact checking at all.

Fact-checking has always been difficult with gossip, because most of us don't have the courage to go to the person the gossip is about to tell them what's being said about them and to hear their side of the story before we pass it on to someone else. It's much easier to just retell the story to someone else you think might like to hear it; that way you don't have to be concerned with little things like whether or not it's true and who it's going to hurt. We play to our own weaknesses and frailties.

We hear what we want to hear, we believe what we want to believe. We do this not only with believing and forwarding bogus emails and passing along gossip, we do it in our individual lives as well.

 

Someone in a bad marriage or a marriage where all the love is gone or an abusive marriage will see only what they want to see and hear only what they want to hear if they have convinced themselves that, for whatever reason, it's impossible to leave the marriage. Even if 90 percent of the marriage is bad, they will concentrate on the 10 percent that isn't.

A woman who is verbally, emotionally, psychologically, and/or physically abused by her husband may justify staying in the marriage because "he works hard to support his family" or "he loves our children," regardless of the horrors she and the children must endure on a regular basis. She desperately seeks out something good to justify her behavior, to convince herself that she's doing the right thing.

 

None of us are immune. People in love with someone will look the other way when the other persons' actions aren't supporting their words; simply refusing to see any sign at all that perhaps the words they're hearing from the other person aren't true. As Percy Sledge sings in "When a Man Loves a Woman," "loving eyes can never see." I still have a letter attached to my refrigerator door that closes with the words, "No matter what happens, know that I'll always love you."

I believed that because I WANTED to believe it, because that's the way I felt and I wanted her to feel exactly the same. So when she said she it, I believed it, without wanting to see or hear any evidence to the contrary. Believing it ruined my life and quashed any hopes and dreams I had for us and a future I thought we were going to spend together.

 

Other people have their lives ruined and their hopes and dreams quashed also when they get taken by con-artists because the con-artist has the ability to tell people what they want to hear. Law enforcement constantly reminds people that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is but this piece of advice often falls on deaf ears.

The people being scammed WANT their investment increased tenfold overnight; they WANT to have a lot more money than they currently have, they WANT to get a lot for little or no effort on their part. The con-men know this and they know how to take advantage of that desire.

 

In the end, it's up to us. Eleanor Roosevelt once said "no one can hurt my feelings without my permission." In other words, people can't do bad things to us, lie to us, deceive us, hurt us, or steal from us unless we allow them to. We're the captains of our own ships and the deciders of our own fates.

 

But we often forget that we are.