Conspiracy Theories

Image credit: Photo by CowGummy on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

It started off innocently enough years ago. She would forward me the usual stories warning me that I should watch out for snakes in McDonald's ball pits or people out to steal my kidneys or serial killers who would lure me out of the house using a baby's cries.  And I would research each item and send back the Snopes.com link to everyone on the mailing list, politely informing them all that this was another urban legend, please don't forward.  I was going to shine the light of white hot truth and logic upon these horrible misconceptions put an end to this wretched chain now.

But of course, I didn't stop them.  The e-mail messages continued to arrive, unresearched.  ("Whatever to your research, Ms. Smartypants.  I totally know someone who knows someone that that happened to!  So there!")  It was annoying and frustrating to know I hadn't fixed this particular problem, but still I knew it didn't matter so very much.  So people stopped traveling or letting their kids go into ball pits or helping the odd baby who showed up on their porch (what were the chances?).  Was the world really going to end if that happened?

Then the political messages started coming.  Need I repeat them?  I'm sure you remember well enough the smears and falsehoods about your preferred candidate that passed through your own inbox.  Those messages I took more seriously, spending my days on FactCheck.org and refuting misinformation point by point, with anger and sarcasm.  After all, now we weren't talking about the merits of fast food play areas, we were talking about elected officials and positions on issues that were really going to affect our lives.  Surely now it was important that I set people straight, make them see the error of their ways and change?  Still, when I pointed out that John Kerry didn't actually cite the wrong Bible verse in a speech, it didn't suddenly make people like him any better.  (I know, it was hard for me to believe too.)

Then there were the endless messages about vaccines causing autism, having caused my son's autism, not a word of which I have ever or will ever believe.  But the studies and the arguments did nothing to stop the "information" from coming.

Then came the flat out conspiracy theories.  The moon landing was faked!  Elvis is alive but Paul McCartney is dead!  The British Royal family are shape shifting reptilian aliens!  Microsoft advocates killing New York Jews through secret messages in its Wingdings font!  (I am really not making these up.  Someone else did.)  These I found I couldn't respond to because, well, how do you prove the Queen of England is not a shape shifting reptilian alien?  But I did inwardly fuss over (but never quite settled on) how to voice my mental health concerns in a way that would fix things.

Enter recovery.  I am powerless over other people's behavior.  I am powerless over their thoughts and opinions.  I am powerless to change them and fix them and make them do things right, see things right, be right.

Finally, most recently, after a period of silence imposed by lengthy lack of computer access, came word that not only do vaccines cause autism, they also don't cure disease.  (Apparently, smallpox was not eradicated by vaccines but by improvements in nutrition, sanitation and health.  Yep, our healthy modern world caused it to spontaneously disappear, even in poverty and famine stricken locations where people drink the same water that is used for bathing and sewage.  All of which makes me shudder to think about what kind of unhealthy lives my parents must have been living if they spent their childhoods in fear of contracting polio.)

And I really don't want to let this one go.  Because there are so many things that trigger my own fear and anger: from serious consequences to our group immunity to disease (because when people fear vaccines, they get sick, and yes, they die) to the implication that my son would be better dead than autistic to (yes, now we get to the heart of things) my plain, old codependent anxiety in the face of someone else's reality.  It's that same feeling of disorientation that I would get when my husband would very calmly, at the height of his addiction, tell me something completely crazy and seem so rational about it that I'd be angry and frightened at the same time that he could possibly believe it was true.

I know the person passing this information along is living in a whole different reality.  I know there's nothing I can do to change her.  I know I need to let go and let God.  I know the best thing to do is to cut her out of my life.  And yet, my first and deepest impulse is to throw myself wholeheartedly into making her crazy stop, thinking that really, this time, if I can finally make it work, if I can chase down and stop every arrow of delusion that's been shot out into the world, that's what's going to stop my crazy.  And ping!  That's me shooting my own arrow of delusion out into the world.  I wonder if it will hit Elvis, wherever he is?

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.