Believe Nothing …

Back in the day when I was in the fray of high tech for higher education, I headed up a committee that would design an appropriate use policy for technology. You would think that should be an easy matter. Everyone can agree on what is right and what is wrong? Right? The assignment turned out to be one of the longest battles (more than a year in the making) and most difficult documents to be approved by the College Council. Because as I would learn, there are 50 shades of gray when it comes to Truth and Consequences.

One of the lines I was proud of that stayed in the final cut was that:

 In a nutshell, it meant that those of us WORKING in IT should know better and if we misused or abused the system in any way there would be hell to pay.

Its an ideal that I still carry with me. And its why I have very little patience when I see someone who knows better take advantage of their position for some type of gain. In Claremont we defined the purpose of the network as “These services are provided for educational purposes and to carry out the legitimate business of the Colleges.” That was suppose to keep the staff from watching porn on their lunch hour or using the campus email list to solicit donations to their daughter’s pre-school performance of Fiddler on The Roof. (What song are you now humming in your head?)

So when I received an email from my car and home insurance company, that will remain nameless, talking about the negative impact of health care reform, I was shocked and down right outraged.  It was a slick “article” at that, crafted to steer the reader into believing if not bold face lies than certainly half-baked semi-truck-truths. Starting with the illusion that the information came from an article in the Washington Post. It didn’t. The by-line was AHIP. A political advocay association who spent more than $31 million dollars lobbying against health care reform between 2005 – 2009.

Not that I don’t trust the AHIP to spoon feed me information about important policy implications, I decided to go directly to the Washing Post and read the article it was said to summarize. Small wonder that the actual editorial in the WP didn’t contain the same scare tactics that AHIP proported.

The fact that my insurance agent felt the need to pass along this wellspring of misinformation put him in the category of misuse of company resources and should have known better. Or at the very least, should have known better than to send ME a negative ad campaign against health care reform.

I wrote to my agent and asked if his mailing was APPROVED by corporate or just something HE decided to pass on to his clients. And of course it was the latter. In his defense he said that the article was from the Washington Post, that he thought it was interesting news that people would want to know about and that he felt it was important that we stay informed on the changes in health care.

Why yes, it IS important that we stay informed. That’s why we should actually READ the parent article that is being sited because this IS a topic people SHOULD know more about. I also added that it was a totally inappropriate use of his company mailing list to send political propaganda, and that I was certain he would understand why I was switching agents immediately.

The facts aren’t hard to find if you want to know what they are. Its also not hard to find a group of like minded misinformed zealots who want to use you for their own political gain.