Two Days Left of Western Food (I suppose)

So here I am two days from leaving on the greatest adventure of my life to date. I'm still not really that excited, nervous, anxious, or scared. This is actually scaring me because after being a traveller for a while now. I always get nervous and scared before going to a new country, heck even a new state. I feel fine. It almost seems routine which makes me beg the question "Why am I going?" I don't know why I'm going but it seems like everything up until this point has presented itself to be an arrow pointing in this direction. The transition has been so easy that it couldn't have been easier if Amber and I had some type of travel tour manager. Anyways the real reason that I'm writing today is because recently I've been responding to a number of conservative christian and pro-war forwards that my parents seem to bombard my inbox with. I've usually just ignored them and let them slip gently under the ax of the delete button. But recently I've decided that if someone is going to put something in my inbox that is blatantly full of hate, then I'm going to respond with my own opinion, much to my parents' chagrin. I have two examples of this. One was sent from my father under the subject line "Stock Tip: war, terror, and disasters. Disaster Capitalism." It was an investment guide to companies that profit from natural disasters and war, but at the end it did ask what people thought about it. So I responded that I thought it was terrible and shouldn't be sent out under a subject line that begins with "Stock Tip." I then took a verbal beating about protecting the US, the only reason I could go to Korea was because of these companies, and how the only reason I was able to see the Dalai Lama @ Emory University was because these companies and the US allowed it. So I wrote some things back. If you'd like to see copies of the emails I'll be glad to send you the transcripts of the discourse. Anyways it ended in a good conversation. The next email I got was an email that showed the new George Washington $1 coin. It showed one side of it and said:

You guessed it

'IN GOD WE TRUST' IS GONE!!!
If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!! DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE. Together we can force them out of circulation.
Please send to all on you mail list !!!

and then above that it had a fake story that said:

Please help do this…

refuse to accept these when they are handed to you. I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead. The lady just smiled and said "way to go" so she had read this e-mail. Please help out....our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

I sent out an email to all the recipients of the forward that included a link(http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/$1coin/index.cfm?flash=yes&action=Washington) to the US mint site with a copy of the coin showing that it indeed still had IN GOD WE TRUST on it. Actually creatively added to the rim of the coin and I might have said something about idiots and this being a hoax that only spreads anger and fear. For this email I have received phone calls and threatening emails. Oh man. I was begged to apologize to the friends of my parents that actually sent me the email forward to begin with.

Anyways I encourage people to not send these types of things out especially if they don't know if what they are sending is true and please don't send them to me because I will lambaste you with my reply. I guess what I am saying is if you send out a forward, I believe that you are looking for some kind of response and you shouldn't be upset if someone responds by calling you out on your fear mongering message. After saying this. I invite anyone to call me out on whatever they want. I want to be fair about this so if I put something up on here that doesn't seem "kosher" then do a little research on it and throw it in my face. I'll post it up as my next post under the heading "I was wrong and here's why." Well hope everyone is doing well. My next post will likely be from the Republic of Korea.

~Cullen