The following is an e-mail I had sent to me today by a very good friend of mine:


This is in memory of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman who were taken for no reason and murdered by Ian Huntley a sick and twisted man plz send this to all of your contacts by 11pm 2nite to show you care.

rest in peace little angels Holly and Jessica xxxx

Please forward if you dont you obviously dont have a heart

(The e-mail was also accompanied by 4 pictures of the girls)

The e-mail must have been forwarded over 20 times before it reached me. However, it's e-mails like this that I truly disagree with. First of all I ask this: What's the point? What in blue blazes difference will it make, if by sending this e-mail onto people we know, we let them also know that we were sickened by the murders and feel the utmost sadness for the parents of the girls?
Why 11pm tonight? What happens then? It's not the anniversary of the murders, so it can't have anything to do with that. What happens after 11, if you send it then you're a bastard maybe? or the e-mail inverts upon itself and you become a Huntley sympathiser? And who the fuck said that sending this to your 'contacts' shows you care? What, so I have to tell people that I hate murderers and feel sorry for kids who are murdered just to show i'm a caring person? No fucking way.

The e-mail goes onto to say 'rest in peace little angels Holly and Jessica xxxx'. Ok, so we're gonna let them rest in peace by doing what, constantly bringing up how evil a bastard Ian Huntley is, and how disturbed as a nation we were by the killings? Because personally (And i'm not religious by any means), if those 2 girls really are in some sort of afterlife now, and our actions decide how they feel, trust me, they're not resting in peace with this kind of shit still going on.

'please forward if you don't you obviously dont have a heart'. This is the part that really riled me. Now, if I don't send this e-mail on to other contacts, i'm an evil bastard. Up there with the Huntley I guess. Excuse me, but it doesn't take the forwarding of an e-mail to make somebody become a caring and considerate person. Something like this happened with the Madrid bombings. The day it happened, some silly bastard decided to post to everyone how if they put an 'x' before their username on MSN Messenger, it would show they were against the bombings. Personally? I would at least want my support to be seen, and the families of those victims aren't going to give a shit whether someone's put the letter 'x' before their name or not on some chat program.

The death's of Holly and Jessica WERE a tragedy, but I didn't raise an eyebrow. Why should I? Every year there's kids getting murdered, so why does it still surprise society that it happens? "Man murders 2 girls, nation in disbelief". WHY???? it's nothing new. People are in uproar because of such a news story, but it doesn't surprise me one iota. I just wait to find out who killed them. I'm not a heartless bastard by no means. If I had kids and any of them were murdered, i'd probably want to kill myself. But screaming uproar, calling for the death penalty, brandishing Huntley the sickest fucko of all time won't bring those children. So why as a nation do we feel the need to bring up such tragedies all the time, leaving the parents with no choice but to keep their wounds fresh and bloody? I'd hope if I ever suffered such a loss that it wouldn't be constantly getting brought up in the press, nor being thrown around the internet as some fucking character vote imposed upon everyone.

Forwarding this e-mail or putting an 'x' before your name will NOT bring these victims back. And by NOT doing what an e-mail or a 'friend' asks you to do doesn't make you a bastard. We live in a society where you're free to do what you want, when you want, and within reason. Choosing NOT to do something doesn't make you an arsehole, just because countless other mindless sheep insist on following such a trend. Send these e-mails on and you end up as bad as these people who bring up Sept 11th every year on the day. There's more tears shed in America on that one day then on any other of the year. And that's not a good thing.

I'm not asking you to not forward these e-mails or place letters before your name, i'm merely suggesting that doing so doesn't make you a candidate for the pearly white gates of heaven. And refusing to do them doesn't mean you're going to hell, nor be looked down upon as a bastard. Because believe me, the only bastards with these trends are the people who create them. To the person who sent that e-mail, shame on you. To the person who started branding 'friends' bastards if they didn't place an 'x' before their names, you're the only bastard in this case.