Ed Quillen of the Denver Post Online has a great article which questions the meaning of the word “terrorist” while skewering the knee-jerk denunciations of dissent by our sanctimonious government officials.

Just in case you don’t get it, the document Quillen is talking about is the Declaration of Independence. And, just in case you don’t remember, the body of the Declaration is a listing of the reasons for our secession from Great Britain. Upon re-reading the Declaration — a good thing to do on this day, especially — I came across a couple of the charges against King George which seemed to have a great deal of resonance today:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. Homeland Security?
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: State of Emergency?
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: Tarriffs on steel?
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: Military Tribunals?
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences Camp X-Ray and “unlawful combatants”?
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments USA PATRIOT Act?

I’m sitting in my computer nook, surfing and typing, surfing and typing. The air conditioning is on and I’m ignoring the very hot outdoor world today. Every couple of minutes, I hear a jet fly overhead. My house is in the flight path for several of the BWI Airport approaches, so I’m used to hearing jets. But these seem too frequent. I start getting concerned.

I know there’s heightened security all over the Capital Region and New York City this Independence Day, so I assume that it’s military jets patrolling the airspace over the Baltimore/Washington corridor. But, even accepting that reasoning, this is still WAY too frequent: a flyover every minute or two, sometimes 3 or 4 flybys within a couple of seconds.

Maybe something is happening. Maybe all those numbingly vague alerts and color-coded threat states are not just there to keep the populace stupefied while our civil liberties are thrown away in a vague and indeterminate “state of emergency”. I check feverishly all the news sites I can think of, but there’s nothing breaking.

I’m being paranoid, I think. I look out the sliding-glass doors, scanning the sky for contrails, fast-moving black dots, mushroom clouds. I see nothing. There’s a knock at my door. The dog barks, there is no other sound. I hesitate, then I open the front door.

It’s my neighbor, Sean, sweating profusely in the 100F heat. His shorts and sneakers are soaking wet, and there’s more moisture than just sweat could be responsible for. I ask him in, but he says, “No thanks, I’m just letting you know that I’m powerwashing my fence — sorry about all the noise — and I’m gonna need to get into your backyard. I hope you don’t mind.”

I tell him its no problem, and I sit back down at my desk. I hear him start up the compressor and then I hear the water hitting the fence, making a sound just like the roaring of a low-flying jet.

I got one of those e-mails again this morning — not the porn or the spam which are like the background radiation of my inbox and are easily ignored. No, this was one from an older relative, who, having discovered the power of the internet, doesn’t always use it wisely. She forwarded to me a call for a boycott of FujiFilm, because, it was claimed, Fuji had erased Israel from a free world map it distributed to its customers. I groaned.

I’ve received this particular email several times already this year, and each time, I painstakingly construct a response which goes something like:

This false e-mail has been circulating since early this year (at least).

It’s been debunked by The Urban Legends Reference at snopes.com. The Wiesenthal Center has an explanation of the rumor and of the dangers of these kinds of inaccuracies to friends and supporters of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a debunking of this rumor as well as a letter from FujiFilm thanking the ADL for its fair and accurate debunking of the issue. It took me about 2 seconds to find all these sources — a search on Google with the terms “fuji israel boycott” brought up all these references on the first page of results.

Please, before attaching your name to these kinds of messages, take a second to check on their accuracy.

Each time I send this message, I wait for some kind of response, some kind of acknowledgement, something… But the usual response is for that person to stop emailing me altogether.

Is it really that hard to admit you are wrong? Maybe so. Maybe it is so unusual that Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle can write an entire column about a Shakesperean scholar who did just that. Donald Foster, who several years ago created his reputation and his career as a literary forensics expert by statistically “proving” that Shakespeare was the author of a previously unascribed poem, now admits in a public forum that he has been proved wrong, and is glad to see the error of his ways.

This is a man with far more to lose in his admission of error than an email forwarder, yet he does so gladly, graciously, because as Carroll points out, “Friends, we have an adult on our hands.”