Urban Legends

Every so often, friends and/or associates (and occasionally blood enemies) forward along some dire warning or other--whether it be some nefarious virus making the rounds, missing children we should be on the lookout for, bills before Congress that will make it legal for ISPs to charge for each piece of e-mail sent, and so on and so forth. The latest (which I had not seen before) came to me this afternoon:

Please read and forward to anyone you know who drives.

My name is Captain Abraham Sands of the Jacksonville, Florida Police Department. I have been asked by state and local authorities to write this email in order to get the word out to car drivers of a very dangerous prank that is occurring in numerous states.

Some person or persons have been affixing hypodermic needles to the underside of gas pump handles. These needles appear to be infected with HIV positive blood. In the Jacksonville area alone there have been 17 cases of people being stuck by these needles over the past five months....

Naturally, whenever I see these my BS detector goes off and for good reason for, as it turns out, this is an urban legend, a common e-mail hoax that has been circulating for at least five years. More information can be found here.

The e-mail hoax is almost the modern equivalent of a chain letter, but even more insidiously, it works by spreading fear--and for some reason in this country we are immeasurably fearful, bizarrely eager to believe that people are preying on us every second of every day or that unspeakable dangers lurk in every food or every product. It's one thing to be common-sensibly diligent and cautious but quite another to be paranoid and terrified of everything. The news media does a good job of propagating this.

There are of course very real threats out there. How to tell the real from the false? Do what I do: whenever I get some missive like the above, I do a quick Google search on some key words (in this case, I Googled "gas pumps and hypodermic needles"). If the first 10 hits are all "urban legend" sites, chances are it's not a real threat.