
By: Don Martin
To: George Mooth
Re: Our Daily Bullshit

George Mooth did "Our Daily Bread" to All, as a daily dose of Spam,
to which Don Martin replied:

    You know, I wasn't always a christian-bashing WOA. Oh, I was
raised WOA, of course, but I always treated believers with the
respect that they keep begging for on this echo. I was nice, polite,
joined in moments of silence silently and generally played along
with the christian agenda for world domination. Until Mrs.
Mickleberry.

    Mrs. Mickleberry was a sad, sallow, overweight woman who lived
in Silverdale, Washington back in the 40s and 50s when I was a kid.
She was nice enough, and helpful as a librarian in the town's tiny
library: that was about my only contact with her, apart from mass
school functions where she was likely to show up as a chaperone or
something.

    Then I went away to college. The first month I was there, I got
a letter that was 10 cents postage due (you have to remember that
this was in the days when 3 cents was the price of your basic first
class letter; in today's terms it was something like $1.35 short),
and 10 cents represented a sizeable chunk of a freshman's
discretionary budget. I paid the money to get the mysterious
mailing.

    It was a fat envelope from fat Mrs. Mickleberry. Inside was a
letter from her in her capacity of her church's "student outreach
coordinator" or some such nonsense and a copy of "The Upper Room", a
boilerplate tract much like your spam greatly favored by the
Methodists, the church at which Mrs. Mickleberry held her position.

    Silverdale was a small town, but it contained three churches,
and of the three the Methodist was the only one I knew anything
about and had some favorable feelings toward, largely because of a
minister who was a decent human being. He moved on a couple of years
before I went away to college (I much later learned that he had been
turned out by his flock for suspected homosexuality--a purely
theoretical suspicion so far as I or anyone else in the town could
tell--but at the time I knew nothing of this), and I was sorry to
see him go. In honor of his memory, I tossed the tract out without
making a fuss about it. Why disturb some sad old lady?

    A month later, I had another such letter from Mrs. Mickleberry.
The silly sow _still_ had not enquired at the Post Office about the
cost of freighting copies of "The Upper Room" to Bellingham, and so
I lost another dime. The landlady had paid it, so I was obligated to
make good her loss. Still, I sent no reply to Mrs. Mickleberry, as I
didn't want to hurt her, and I certainly didn't want to add another
3 cents to the 20 that I had already poured down this particular rat
hole.

    A month after that I got lucky: I encountered the postman who
informed me that I had a Postage Due. I asked whether I could see
the letter, and he showed it to me. It was the monthly load from
Mrs. Mickleberry. I asked whether I could refuse to accept this
mail; he said I could, and I so refused it. It went back to Mrs.
Mickleberry and _she_ got to pay the 10 cents (and whatever else for
the return trip). No more copies of "The Upper Room" came my way.

    Mrs. Mickleberry has been dead over a quarter of a century now,
and thinking about her still pisses me off. She was the first of a
long line of well-meaning twits, busily doing good as she defined
the good to be, without a thought for whether her targets wished the
good she had to offer, and without the common decency to pay her own
freight on the loads she dumped on others. She was a nice lady and a
shithead.

    You may be a nice person, George, but I cannot say because I
have never met you. You ARE a shithead, just like Mrs. Mickleberry,
because you do the same annoying things as she did without the
common decency to pay your own freight. There are something like
50,000 nodes on Fidonet, each run by people paying their own phone
bills. Now the spam you dump may only cost each of them a fraction
of a cent per week to acquire/pass on, but when you start to
multiply any such fraction times 50,000, the total is likely to be
more than Mrs. Mickleberry's 10 cents (in 1955 currency). Even 0.01
cents per system mounts up to some $5.00 per week, $20.00 per month.

    Suggestion: why don't you at least contribute some such amount
weekly to a secular charity (cancer society or the like) in lieu of
your being able to pay the sysops for carrying the dead load of your
boilerplate. A message to that effect could be included on the spam
itself, and you would at least have become a more honest shithead,
however annoying a one you continue to be.

... Through a Jaundiced Eye Darkly--Rheum With a View
              (don@balt-rehab.med.va.gov)

--- Blue Wave/386 v2.20
 * Origin: Nerve Center - Source of the SPINAL_INJURY echo! (1:261/1000)

