Let me be clear on this

Sometimes we find out quickly. Other times we find out after years of being lied to and the lie is so convincing. I'm the type of person that scrutinizes everything. Really? Two for one sale? How much is the normal one for sale for? Do I have to buy two and then get one free or do I just pay the price of one and you give me two? Does the warranty still apply for both? Is there a warranty on the watches you're selling out of the back of your truck? Will you be here next week if there's a problem with either one? These are the questions I ask now. When I was younger I fell victim to a scam while I was in the military. Can you imagine a young man from west central Illinois without much life experience with a military haircut on a beach in San Diego would be the target of a scammer? Well, it happens. I was sold a camera (it still sits in my dresser drawer as a reminder of life when you could still buy rolls of film) and it came in a packaged deal. You had to take photos with the thing. And, there were literally thousands of dollars worth of coupons for developing the film. It came in a bag and a three ring binder filled with coupons and coupons of developing credits. You just had to take the pictures. Now the camera itself was a nice camera. It even had this circle that you had to adjust just right with your manual focus ring so that you were taking the most awesome picture you could imagine. And you only had to find a store that took that coupon or mail the roll of film off with the coupon and hope it came back developed. And there were hundreds of coupons in that three ring binder. So, if you did mail off the film, with the hopes it would return, you had to pay the postage to mail it. And then you had to wait the week for it to be processed. Now, imagine going through that today. We can't even wait the twenty seconds for a photo to upload via the wireless routing or data connection on our phones. And then, after twenty seconds, we feel fulfilled. Because the memory is documented. But twenty five years ago, actually closer to thirty, there was no uploading or cloud memory or the word digital was something you mentioned in front of alarm clock or wristwatch. We have changed in the past thirty years. Some for the better but a lot for the worse. And we're more tired. We push ourselves and fill our hours with so much nonsense and extra stress that really is unnecessary. For example - two guys open facebook accounts. Two girls open their own facebook accounts. The girl notices the other girl has posted a facebook pic with the guy in it. But the girl really likes the guy but the other girl doesn't know this but thought the puppy running in front of the table where the guy was sitting was adorable. The first girl confides in her best friend, the second guy I mentioned, that the other girl is uploading pictures of the guy she really likes but can't tell him because he doesn't have a public profile. Now the other guy feels a little threatened by the first girl I mentioned because he has a secret about his feelings for the first guy I mentioned but doesn't have the courage to make his orientation public on facebook yet so he secretly has a crush on the guy that the first girl has a secret crush on. Now, the second girl has a crush on the second guy I mentioned and doesn't know that he's on the fence if he's fully gay or just unsure of who he is. Now the first guy, without knowing any of this drama, decides to look up people from his old school on facebook but wants to keep his profile private without attracting any "loons". Without realizing what he's doing he invites the third girl (I hadn't mentioned her yet) to become his friend because he's mistakenly requested her friendship even though she isn't the same gal he was originally thinking of. But the third girl is friends with the second girl and without knowing what she's doing, accepts the friend request from the first guy which infuriates the first girl who is already friends with the third girl who has no idea that the first girl, who she friended because they used to work together at a Taco Bell when they were in high school, has a stalker thing going for the first guy. The first girl decides to slash the tires of the third girls car and the officer who shows up to take down the information is the second guy I mentioned. When he recognizes the third girl from the his facebook friend's pictures in the first girl's account he starts to realize who she is and decides that the third girl needs to come in to the precinct and answer a few questions about where she was the night before when he notices her McDonald's uniform and remembers a report filed about a robbery involving someone in a fast food restaurant uniform who stole a wallet from some guy (not part of this story) in her neighborhood. So goes life with facebook. But we're killing ourselves through unnecessary stress. And the scams perpetuated on the internet are countless. Everyday, if you actually looked at the spam heading in your email account, you would see offers for many cures and money investment schemes and other offers too good to be true. And we think it's just mostly on the internet. But we have it in real life also. Ever listed an electronic on craigslist? Oh the joy of weeding out the terrific, too good to be offers to pay extra for your item if only you would ship it to their half-brother who just took on a missionary journey for his church and they just left on a business trip and can't pick up locally. What!!!???? You'll pay me an extra two hundred dollars to ship it and all I have to give you is my paypal account information? What a deal. So life is exhausting even when you're just trying to clean the closet out and get rid of that extra iPhone. What has happened? And we fight off the scams so much but the really big scams are treated with an air of calm and rationality. Well, he's the president and I'm sure he knows best. Surely the I.R.S. wouldn't use their influence to ruin a man's life through audits just to facilitate the results on an election. I'm sure the United States Attorney General wouldn't lie to the public about something as serious as a gun program gone bad. But we, (not me because I'm pretty vocal about these scammers), just accept the scam and try to go on. Life is filled with too many important things like facebook and angry birds. And has it really been two days since Twitter heard from you? What kind of uncaring, out-of-date recluse are you? If only we paid as much attention to the head guy in the White House as we do to our friend's newest uploaded picture. But we can actually say something to them can't we? We can actually start a fight with that uncaring radical who accepted that friend request from the dirtbag who broke up with us twenty years ago but what can we do about the unimportant things like the leadership of the country we live in. I'm just a waiter in a family restaurant and they're gonna do what they're gonna do in Washington. And even here in our local politics the machine continues to grind away at our freedoms and economy until it's just another day in the neighborhood. What can I do? I gotta keep working and buying groceries. No matter how soon the wheel is gonna fall off we are afraid to rock the cart as they say. The rabid dog isn't biting me so why would I want to poke it with a stick. It might turn it's crazed eyes on me and then I'll have to protect myself proactively. So scams are scams and we just try our best to not get taken by the promise of an internet email. But the really bad scams are so bad, so complex, so dirty, and so ingrained into our world we choose to not see them anymore. And the few who do make a stand for the rest of us will be executed after the next convenient agency meeting of the minds controlled by somebody but not the President of the United States. Because that would make him no more better then that guy that just sent you a friend request you never even met before. My name is Rueuhy and I approve this blog.