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Friends, I give you: the bizarre case of Kitty O'Meara. Many of you know her as the author of this insipid bit of prose that made the rounds early in March. (1/10)
I was seeing it shared so often that I wanted to find out who this lady was, so I did some Internet sleuthing, only to find that a woman in Italy claimed to have written it: (2/10)
By the time the poem has surfaced again, it was attributed to Irene, but with translation credit to the mysterious Kitty O'Meara. (3/10)
It disappeared for awhile, but NOW it has surface as having been written in 1869 by a "Kathleen O'Meara" and then reprinted in 1919 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. (4/10)
According to my most recent Googling, Kitty O'Meara is actually a Wisconsin school teacher: (5/10) https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/irish-american-teachers-poem-covid19-outbreak
But what I find so fascinating about this is at each turn, a human brain willingly took the time to re-adjust the narrative and attribution without any basis in fact and for no particular reason. Someone made the conscious choice to set the poem in 1869. Why? (6/10)
Was it for clickbait? Is this some surreptitious data tracking, or is this like how a virus mutates? I had to DIG for the Kitty/Irene exchange, but then it showed up in random poetry communities where the poem was cited. Again, why? (7/10)
What do people have to gain by changing the ownership and timeline of this set of words? And how much other content out there, innocent little poems and passages, pass through these same filters? We know fake news is a thing - but what about fake content? (8/10)
We all share these little bits of feel-good sentiment, but we never question where they came from. I chased down some gay pride memes that just linked to a generic merch page and now some unknown company has my data for retargeting and heaven knows what else. (9/10)
In conclusion, just check your sources before sharing something that's making the rounds and also I've been watching WestWorld, so I'm also convinced that Kitty O'Meara is actually Dolores Abernathy. (10/10)
