An acquaintance of mine is a serial e-mailer. I’m guessing that everyone has at least one of those in your life, and women seem to collect more of them than men. These are the people that pass on the occasional joke or Letterman list or series of wacky photos of kitties that fell asleep in their food. And they send thoughts and expressions, which are sometimes good for a grin, though I could live without the animated emoticons, which I find curiously annoying.

But worst of all, they forward massively-reproduced e-mails that are structured to require a response. A new computer virus is coming. A lawyer in San Antonio is going to insist on Satanic rituals being performed at the post office. A tiny, tiny child said just the most precious thing to her neurosurgeon before her delicate brain-spanking procedure. The Ford Motor Company will give you $30,000 for every single person you irritate by sending an e-mail to.

And today, … it was a fast-breaking story about an inspirational speech given by Darrell Scott, father of a victim of the shootings at Columbine High School, to a special session of Congress. And when I say “fast-breaking,” of course I mean that this is a six-year-old internet-generated story about a seven-year-old event. Not exactly a hoax, since Mr. Scott actually did give the speech to a small group of sub-committie members a month after the 1999 shootings. But certainly not a newsflash, and also not something that the media and Congress moved to quash, as suggested in the inflammatory preamble of the e-mail.

You can read about it here, as I wish my friend would’ve done. I have told her a few times that a one-minute search on snopes.com will usually tell you where you stand with those e-mails that demand a response. But I’ve found that suggesting to a serial e-mailer that they check the facts meets with a cool politeness, and the news that they’re helping keeping an internet hoax alive makes them mad. So do they prefer the myth, or do they just begrudge me any course corrections because it impugns their status as Purveyor of Folk Wisdom?

I’m overthinking, of course, since the truth is that it’s probably just a minor impulse in any case.

Still, as I was reading through the accurate story of Mr. Scott’s speech, I mulled over how odd our preference for a myth over the truth is sometimes. It’s a good speech; there’s lots there for Christians to agree with. Does it need the brightly-colored icing of a shocked Congress and a censuring media to communicate that?

Or consider the other myth that came out of Columbine — the myth that one of the girls who was killed — Cassie Bernall — was asked by her assailant if she believed in God and shot to death when she answered “yes.”

What actually happened is probably more disturbing than that, because even the minor act of Christian witness and heroism is missing. Salon carried the story in September of 1999:

As the Rocky Mountain News reported Sept. 24, [Emily] Wyant and [Cassie] Bernall were studying alone together in the back of the library. After the gunmen rushed in, the girls crouched beneath a table together, and Cassie began praying aloud: “Dear God. Dear God. Why is this happening? I just want to go home.” Dylan Klebold suddenly slammed his hand on the table, yelled “Peekaboo,” and looked underneath. He shot Cassie without exchanging a word. …

[Valerie] Schnurr was down on her hands and knees bleeding, already hit by 34 shotgun pellets, when one of the killers approached her. She was saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, don’t let me die,” and he asked her if she believed in God. She said yes; he asked why. “Because I believe and my parents brought me up that way,” she said. He reloaded, but didn’t shoot again. She crawled away.

The way the story with Cassie Bernall probably got started was that another student in the library, Craig Scott (son of Darrell Scott who gave the speech in Congress, interestingly enough), heard the exchange of “Do you believe in God?”, “Yes” and thought it was Cassie talking.

I’m not talking about this because it’s terribly important that everyone get this right seven years later. I guess I’m talking about it because it makes you realize what a fragile thing the truth is somehow. It’s so much easier for strong-sounding rhetoric to make the facts seem irrelevant. I’m hoping that’s why those silly internet serial e-mails bother me so much. We’re all trying to get at the truth. Tiresome fabrications don’t help, and by wearing down your critical faculties, they do some harm.