The media (accidentally?) missed this one!
The troops overseas would like you to send it to everybody you know.
Don't know whether you heard about this but Denzel Washington and his family visited the troops at Brook Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas (BAMC) the other day. This is where soldiers who have been evacuated from Germany come to be hospitalized in the United States, especially burn victims. There are some buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher
House is a hotel where soldiers' families can stay, for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying on base, but as you can imagine, they are almost filled most of the time.
While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how much one of them would cost to build. He took his cheque book out and wrote a cheque for the full amount right there on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear this story and want to get the word out to the American public, because it warmed their hearts to hear it.
The question is - why do:
Britney Spears,
Madonna,
Tom Cruise
and other Hollywood fluff
make front page news with their ridiculous antics and Denzel Washington's charity doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the local newspaper in San Antonio?
This needs as wide a distribution as we can create... share it!
According to Wikipedia, Washington made a 'sizable donation' to the Fisher Houses, so it seems that this story is mostly, if not completely true. I sometimes wonder how far information can travel via the virtual rabbit warren that is military forwarded email. I'm not sure where half the games, jokes, pictures, surveys and trivia come from, seeing as most 'fun' sites are blocked on the Defence computers, so how would people find any of this stuff to be able to send it through a work computer in the first place? Obviously there must be connections to and from the outside, somewhere along the line.
Sure, it just might be my paranoia that Big Brother is sifting through every joke email that goes against our basic equity and diversity training, recording the amount of times particular messages get forwarded around the network. Heck, if I was in charge and I wanted to catch people in the act, all I'd have to do is collect a week's worth of junk mail and look through the headers to see who's been forwarding to whom. Even if stuff is particularly funny, I just practice good netiquette and save other people's inboxes from the junk that will no less get forwarded to them from someone else if I choose not to.
It's frustrating sometimes to take a couple days away from the computer and have to go through piles of irrelevant email from well-meaning friends posted all over the nation, as well as the odd message from the Secretary of Defence. I haven't had to deal with this many dodgy jokes since I was at uni, and that was back in the nineties when joke emails were actually all the rage (well, there was no Facebook yet, what can I say). What's wrong with the odd bit of actual correspondence from old recruit friends? Do people really count themselves as your friend when they forward along a schmaltzy powerpoint presentation telling the moral about the cookies at the airport? Someone actually asked me the other day if I was getting their emails, because I hadn't seen them in a while, and hadn't responded to any of their forwards! I just don't have the heart to tell people that when they send me a 'real' email, I'll consider taking the time out to reply personally. Or perhaps I should start replying personally to each forward I receive, in an attempt to find out what's really going on with the lives of my military cohorts.
Maybe I'm just jealous of the fact that so many people I know seem to have all the time in the world to read and forward such blatantly non-work-related email. I mean, the above story is a quite effective warm and fuzzy one, so I suppose ten points go to the corporal for getting sucked in enough to pass that one on (it is interesting what kind of spin US as well as Australian media is willing to put on celebrity, as opposed to military... and as for celebrity military, well look out!). I find that by the time I've been at work for nine hours, I simply can't be arsed reading, let alone forwarding, any junk mail, no matter what the quality is. Technically we get paid 24/7 to serve the country, so I'm bitching about people wasting company time while I'm still on company time, but that's not the point. Maybe I should start blogging from the kitchen again!
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