February is upon us, and the annual anti-seal hunt emails have begun. Every year, we get thousands of them.
And every year, in an age of electronic rubber-stamping, the actual number of individual letters gets smaller and smaller.
That seems counter-intuitive — tonnes of emails, but fewer and fewer individual contacts.
But it’s true — and you can blame the Internet for making the letters easier to send, and easier to compose.
Why?
Because they’re not really someone’s letter at all — they’re as much spam as the latest email telling you your help is needed laundering millions of dollars of stolen Nigerian weapons payments.
Let’s dissect the anti-sealing letter we received from Dr. Luigi Erba in Monza, Italy, on Monday.
It contains the sentence, “Instead of investing in meaningful employment opportunities for Newfoundlanders, the federal government continues to fund and support a seasonal and wasteful seal hunt which draws national and international criticism to a proud region of Canada trying to build a reputation for high-tech research and first-class environmental tourism.”
Run that sentence through Google, and you find its source in seconds: it’s a sample letter suggested in an online petition from Change.org.
There were 584 signatures on the anti-sealing petition on Feb. 9 — the organizers were looking for 1,000.
Change.org is a veritable clearinghouse of petitions: you can find a place there to urge the city of Nashville to “expand anti-discrimination law to contractors and vendors” (1,045 signatures) or to force eBay to stop selling live animals (9,003 signatures). You can ask the Publix grocery store chain to sell “slave-free tomatoes” (6,193 signatures) or try to force the U.S. Congress to stop buying bottled water (50,717 signatures).
It’s an impressive warehouse of dissent, and one that regularly wins victories for its petitioners. But in some ways, it’s a victim of its own ease.
Yes, you can go online and quickly register your disapproval on hundreds of petitions — 13 of them on the Canadian seal hunt alone, including one seeking a maple syrup boycott. But your three seconds of cut-and-paste effort will get, if you’re lucky, three whole seconds of consideration.
In the coming weeks, we’ll receive the same e-mailed letters from Italy and Germany, from France and the United States and Great Britain. Many will be caught in automatic spam filters and simply be discarded, unread.
Perhaps it’s the treatment they deserve. It’s hard to argue that you’re trying to have an honest discussion about a serious issue when you can’t even be bothered to put it in your own words.
From the St. John’s Telegram.