Against Stupidity

"Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain." -Friedrich von Schiller

The stupidest person I ever met was a high school girl. One could easily say that all high-schoolers are stupid in their own way, but this girl was a unique specemin. Her name eludes me, but I remember she had brunette hair, stood about five feet tall and was wearing a purple pantsuit. The first and last time I met her was February of 1998.

I was judging a round of Oratory. In high school, I was active in Speech and Debate, and by my senior year, I had established enough points that I was allowed to judge in tournaments in which neither I nor any of my teammates were competing. For those of you that don’t know, Oratory is an event where one writes an eight-minute speech on virtually any topic and simply delivers said speech. As this young girl stepped in front of the class of spectators, opponents and judges, she wrote the title of her speech on the chalkboard. It was titled “Sugar.”

Her speech began with a short history of sugar. She spoke about the early origins of commercial sugar in the Western Hemisphere as being derived primarily from beets, but during the age of European colonization in warmer climes, the import of sugar made from cane flooded Europe, offering a much cheaper alternative, and the use of sugar as a sweetener in beverages and baked goods began to rise. She then skipped ahead to the modern era, telling us about the commercial use of even cheaper corn syrup as a sweetener in everything from manufactured beverages and candies, to breads and infant formulas.

At this point, I was forcing my eyes to keep from rolling. I was fully expecting her to launch into a diatribe about the abundant use of sugar in virtually every product on the shelves, and into the various conspiracy theories about manufactured sugars being directly responsible for every malady from obesity to Parkinson’s disease. Judging these things was grueling at best, so one must come prepared for the worst.

These speeches are supposed to have a point, you see, a thesis, if you will. 1. Sugar is everywhere. 2. Sugar is bad. 3. We need to get rid of sugar. Thank you, goodnight. What she did, however, was something entirely different.

She told us all a story about how nurses caring for the wounded behind the battlefields in France during World War II used hand-made sugar pills to treat the ailing soldiers when they ran out of morphine pills. Amazingly, the nurses reported, many of the men felt better. She then told a similar story about combat hospitals in Vietnam. Then she cited several studies performed by very reputable medical institutions across the world throughout the early part of the 20th century about patients that are told they’re being given a drug to cure their maladies, but are in fact given sugar pills,. Amazingly, in some case up to 90% of patients feel better. Thesis: The medical establishment has ignored the healing power of sugar. Thank you, goodnight.



I was stunned. I was flabbergasted. I was speechless. I was without speech. This girl had prepared an eight-minute speech on a subject, and had completely missed her own point. I scored her last in the round and wrote two words on her score sheet. I’ll give you a hint: the first one starts with a P.

This girl stands out in my memory as the stupidest person I’ve ever encountered, not because she simply missed the point, but because she had clearly been working on this speech for weeks, had likely run drafts by her coach and teammates, had done research to support her thesis, and still missed the point. If she had stumbled upon the phrase “placebo effect” in any of her readings, which we can only assume she did, she tossed it aside as immaterial to her point.

I’ve been thinking about this poor, misguided soul a good deal lately, and not just because I’ve been in a bad mood for three months, or because I hate pantsuits. While I still believe the vast majority of humans are intelligent, resourceful and responsible people, the evidence that the tide is turning in the opposite direction has begun to mount. I’m skeptical, and am not yet prepared to make a final decision, but I’m beginning to fear that people are getting stupider by the minute.

I walked into a dry cleaner the other day and hung up several shirts and pants on the rack attached to the counter. The woman picked up the receipt book and asked my name. I told her. I asked when the clothes would be ready to pick up. “Tuesday at five P.M.” she told me.

“Excuse me?” I asked, “The sign right there in your window says that if I drop off my clothes off by nine A.M., they’ll be done by three o’clock. It’s 8:30 A.M.”

“Yeah,” she replied, “We don’t really do that.”

“Then why is the sign in the window?”

She stared at me, blankly.

I stared back at her.

Her eyes wandered to the sign that was in the window, then back to me. An awkward minute passed, no sound, no motion. It seemed that time had stopped, the sound of the morning traffic outside seemed to mute and the world paused on its axis. It was true, I knew it was true, there was no way to deny it any longer: people are getting stupider.

And the woman at the hamburger stand I visited the day before, where I ordered mustard on said hamburger, and she couldn’t find the “mustard” button so she pressed the “mayonnaise” button instead. I watched her do it. Or the young man at the sushi bar, when asked what kind of sake was available, replied “The clear kind. Also, some that’s not clear.” I overheard a woman in the office tell a story about how her father was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, and another woman asked “Did he survive?”

I simply can no longer ignore the big, stupid elephant in the room.

Take, for example, the story of a man in Houston. The restaurant where he was eating called police after he left without paying for his food. They informed the officers that he was seen entering a nearby vacant building. The police entered the large, empty building, and one officer, deciding to inject some levity into the situation, called out “Marco!” The man called out, “Polo!” and was soon located and arrested.

Let’s also consider Lane Jensen of Edmonton, Canada. In an effort to make the tattoo of a cowgirl on his calf more “sexy,” Jensen paid a plastic surgeon to insert tiny breast implants under his skin. They became infected, the sutures split and to quote the article, “a litre of lymphatic fluid drained from Jensen’s leg.”



There’s also the story of the Marion, Florida woman who is convinced that the holy lord, Christian god, the creator of heaven and Earth, the redeemer and the savior of all humanity, is speaking to her through the insides of a potato.



Finally, in a sweeping example of growing stupidity, I direct you to a report from the Centers for Disease Control in which they document the deaths of at least 82 youths in what they call “the choking game.” Apparently, in a desperate attempt to alter their minds, they strangle themselves (or have someone strangle them…..imagine your friend asking you to do that…) and enjoy the resulting “cool and dreamy feeling.” Just think, if those poor Namibian kids had heard about this, they wouldn’t have to huff poo-gas just to get through the day.

(To prevent any unnecessary comments, yes I am aware that the Jenkem story is mostly an urban legend, but it’s still funny as hell. I also like that some news outlet dubbed it “butt hash.”)

Even while I’m writing this, I’m still forced to answer this evidence by pointing out that for every person that doesn’t install saline bags in his calf, or speak to Jesus through vegetables, there are billions and billions that don’t. On the other hand, there’s the woman that sued a shopping center after being attacked by a goose, the man that bothered to make the world’s biggest fish stick, and I’m sure SOMEONE has actually bought one of these. I’d rather not discuss Miss South Corlina.

No, I don’t think most people are stupid. I will reserve that judgment until after I’ve met most people. Until then, I can only shake my head in disbelief when I read about a woman in Montana that paid a door-to-door salesman to give her a tattoo with a homemade gun, and was shocked when it got infected.

Is the tide actually turning? Can we expect a trend of de-evolution, like in Idiocracy, where humanity will find itself spraying sports drinks onto crops and watching hours and hours of men being kicked in the balls for entertainment? Run a search on you tube for "kicked in the balls," and tell me we're not in trouble.

Despite my crabby mood, I still think the best of humanity, I just fear for its future sometimes, like a concerned uncle that’s too lazy to do anything but tell the bartender that he “worried about Timmy.” I suppose I could just stop reading Reuters “Odd News.”