Stupid – Where's your sign?Stupid – Where's your sign?Some time ago there was a series of Country & Western songs called “Whereas your sign?” These songs centered around people asking stupid questions and doing stupid things. The third or fourth song in this series pointed out that we all do stupid things at some time or another.
This is not about the one or two stupid things that we occasionally do. This is about blatant stupidity: stupidity by choice.
When you are told that if you continue doing what you are doing that you will die, it is stupid to continue doing what you are doing. That is, unless it is your intention to be dead and that is a different problem.
The government tells you that smoking cigarettes will kill
you. If you still smoke, either you do not believe the government
or you do. In either case, smoking will kill you.
It is OK to not believe the government but these days even
the cigarette companies tell you that the intended use of their
products will
kill you. If you smoke, you qualify as stupid. Period.
They have statistics on how many years shorter you will live on
average if you smoke. You know that the life insurance companies
use these statistics to compute your rates. If you smoke,
you pay more money for your insurance. I think you could figure
mortality by the day if so inclined. In other words, how many days less
will you live if you smoke. Then you could say that each day
that you smoke is one less day that you will live. When you are
young, you do not worry about the far end so much but as when you approach
the far end,. It may become clear that all those days that you
smoked have made the far end not so distant.
In August of 1970, some bad people bombed the University of Wisconsin old Chemistry building. The bombers had their reasons although I believe the bombers were somewhat demented. The bombers were nice enough to give warning of their actions. As a result Campus Security canvassed the building warning everyone to leave. With a single exception, everyone did. During these times and in this place, all bomb threats were taken seriously. The bomb went off and the building severely damaged. The student from South Bend, Indiana who had refused to leave, died. The government, when it ultimately arrested the bombers, charged them with murder. This was more a mercy killing than murder. Stupidity should not be rewarded or encouraged.
In 1992 I was vacationing in Arizona when I saw Hurricane Andrew appear on the weather map. Andrew was heralded as a major hurricane -- it was sitting several hundred miles due east of my home in Boca Raton, Florida. I grabbed my daughter and my car and we drove as rapidly as possible back home. We then spent the remaining day before the hurricane struck boarding up the house and otherwise preparing for the storm of the century. The other preparations included chlorine bleach to handle polluted drinking water, batteries for lack of electricity, additional canned foods to make sure that we could eat, and money at the ATM.
On Sunday morning I was the only one doing this. The only problem was the usual Sunday, church-going people cluttering up the streets (one third of the people in Palm Beach County are past retirement age). There was not even a long line of people buying plywood at the Home Depot. I spent the rest of the day boarding up the house. One other person in our development also boarded his house.
The Florida Turnpike toll booths were closed and people were told to leave if they could. Few people took advantage of the free ride. There was a deluge of local and national news saying to leave while you still could. I did not leave because at that point they had determined that we were north of the expected serious damage path.
When the hurricane hit in the morning, it toppled one palm tree and tore off 10 shingles. The boarding up and other precautions turned out to be unnecessary as the hurricane hit 40 miles south. A friend of mine 10 miles south had more damage. I wasted the end of my vacation and $100 and a day's effort.
The real surprise to me was when I showed up for work the next day. Everyone was talking about the hurricane. One person had pictures of his foundation: the rest of the house was gone. The subject was “Why did they not tell us how bad it would be?” My God. I saw it on national news 2000 miles away a week before it happened. The Sunday before it happened the hurricane was on all stations all of the time: this is a Type 4 or 5 hurricane and they do not get worse and it will hit land where you live. What was not told? They had better warning than the guy who died in the MRC.
I have been watching the news on hurricane Charley.
The same as before with one major exception:
The news and the request to leave was even more pervasive than in 1992.
Moreover, the local law enforcement went door-to-door telling people
that they must get out of
town.
Law enforcement can warn you but it cannot force you to go.
Many people remained. The news is now full of their stories.
Some of them are dead. Some have been terrorized.
Some got to buildings and surrounded themselves with mattresses, etc.
We
shall hear more about how they should have been bodily carried out of
the area
because they were too stupid to listen to the warnings.
I sort of feel that we should be happy they are gone and not trying to
figure out what else we could have done for them.
Those who could not leave do not fit into this category.
They just found the little boy scout lost in the Utah
mountains. He was lost for 4 days. Luckily he could not
escape when standing in the middle of the trail and a rescuer
suddenly appeared. The problem? He had hidden from previous
"strangers" searching for him. We are scaring our children to
death with this stranger-danger bullshit.
If you have read the rest of my stuff, you know I admire the Mexican
culture. You will not find a culture more careful with their
children. Mothers watch over their daughters as if their girls
would
vaporize if not in hearing or sight. Yet, the Mexican children
are not afraid to live. They wave as I go down the street.
They smile until it looks like their faces will split if you say say a
good word to them or ask to take their picture.
But in the good old USA, we scare our kids into being afraid of
anyone. Anyone at all. If one of my kids were lost in the
mountains, she would not have hidden from people calling her
name. My kids spent a lot of time in the mountains. Not
always in my sight or hearing. But they learned how to live in
the woods. They learned to be safe. They learned to work
with their sense of direction. They learned to trust each other
in getting from one place to another. They learned to be together
if I were out of sight. At eleven years old (the age of this boy
scout) they would go to the mall, a large mall, and learn to wonder
around -- with each other or with friends. Each year we went on
a camping trip. They learned how to set up the equipment and
take care of themselves -- sometimes with me totally ignoring them
taking their walks or setting up camp. Lazy dad? No.
Both girls learned to take initiative. You should have seen Bree
take off when the tent started blowing away. You want to see
something funny? A 10 year old girl chasing an 8 foot diameter
ball across the woods. She caught it and we brought it
back. Did she ask me if she could chase it? Did she tell me to go
get it? No. She took the initiative. By the time I
got there, she had it pinned down.
One of the questions to be asked of the Boy Scout Troop is how did they manage to lose a scout with such a personality problem? If he were pathologically shy, he should have at least had a partner if not an adult watching at all times.
My kids learned to not talk to strangers. My ex-wife was
always, I mean always, battling the custody of the children. She
took the kids to a windmill-chasing psychologist, Dr. Phil Esplin, to
get a professional opinion forcing the courts to assign the kids to
her. Megan refused to talk to him. She only growled when he
asked questions. This earned me an interview with Dr.
Esplin. He claimed that something was wrong with Megan if at her
age she
could not speak but only growled. I stated that Megan was
extremely eloquent for 6 years old.
We fetched Megan and he asked her questions. Megan
growled. Dr. Esplin thought he had proved his point: something
was very wrong with a 6-year-old who could not talk. I figured it
out: he was a stranger! I asked her about it then introduced Dr.
Esplin as her mother's designated psychologist. Megan reluctantly
answered his questions in very good English. Now he was not a
stranger. Dangerous? Yes, but stranger? No.
It was funny but I could not laugh -- too much was on the
line. Megan was not supposed to talk with strangers and she
recognized that Dr. Esplin was dangerous to her way of life. She
not only recognized this by herself but she watched her sister's anger
and reluctance. In other words, Megan analyzed the situation and
decided that her best reaction was to vocalize her anger at being
placed in an impossible situation.
Here is the thing: teaching anything absolutely generates robotic people who cannot think for themselves. As my older daughter is fond of saying, you get judgment from experience. No experience, no judgment. If you replace experience with teaching, your student learns nothing except rules and fear. It is critical to teach thinking skills -- not rules. This is my primary rule of learning: listen, analyze, experience, summarize. This sequence is critical. Leave one step out and nothing is learned except fear.
Many years ago I would take my family to Disneyland. We
always looked forward to these visits. I was always amazed at the
cleanliness of the park and the general courtesy of the people: both
the employees and the visitors. It made me wonder about the
downside. The rude and dirty people must be going
somewhere. One day I took my kids to Six Flags Magic Mountain
across town from Disneyland. It was obvious that I had found the
downside. Oh. We had a blast on the rides. I mean
Magic Mountain is for the rides. Disneyland is for the family
entertainment with rides as the catalyst. But Magic Mountain had
the rides. I loved the traditional roller coaster. I
even convinced my kids to take the backwards ride.
But we saw the dirty people. We saw the people throwing papers
and food on the ground with no one to clean up after them. By the
end of the day -- and we stayed until the park closed -- the park was
litter from one end to the other. But we saw worse than
that. There were signs posted that skipping in lines would get
you expelled from the park. Yet skipping was popular and
common. Late in the evening we got in line for a ride that during
the day had a line too long for us to wait. A gang of
unsupervised teenage kids then proceeded to hopscotch through the
line. No one stopped them and they thought that they could get
away with it. Brazen. But someone did squeal on them and
they were kicked out of the ride line. They should have been
expelled from the park if the signs had any truth to them. On the
way out of the ride line, the leader came up to me and told me that
they would be waiting outside the exit gate to beat me up. He
believed that I was the one who had squealed.
When it came time to leave -- as the park was closing -- I saw the
gang. They really were outside the gate waiting to beat me
up. I asked security to assist us to our car and pointed out
the gang to them. Security would not help us -- but they did
permit
us to leave by the employee gate -- not too far from the gang but
enough that the gang did not see us. I guess that the gang waited
until the park was empty.
This is the kind of problem that festers. And not my
problem to analyze. We just never returned. We also never went to
Six Flags in Chicago, Dallas, or Atlanta although we drove past each of
them on our way to somewhere else. It is now 25 years since that
incident. Not only have I never returned to any Six Flags park
but my children have not taken their families to any Six Flags park.
An old high school friend on his Facebook wall quoted someone that
average intelligence means that you are smarter than half the people
you meet. My first reaction was to respond but then I ran out of
short responses. On Facebook, responses need to be short.
My high school friend must live in a really depressed area to make such a comment -- or he is bored. He
and I graduated in the college-bound segment of our high school graduating class -- a
school rated in the top three in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.
That is to say that it is likely that 90% of the people in our
classes, that is, our social group, were above the 50% figure. I
am not sure that when we graduated we even knew what the "average
intelligence" group included -- but it did not include us.
Being smarter does not make you better. Mostly the not so
smart people are the ones who think they are better. There are
three obvious indicators, maybe more. Hypocrisy is a cultural
downer. Macho is a personal downer. Any Republican, especially
the Palin Teabaggers, are automatically there.
I can tell you 50 years after high school that the lower 50% are out
there and are
not difficult to find. I could make a list but I am not sure that
it would be inclusive, not sure that anyone would care, and it
certainly would be very long. I just wish that they would wear a
sign.
I make excuses. I say that each culture is
different. I say that the number of homeless dogs should be
reduced as they pack and become vicious. Even the homeless dogs
that pick a home and eat the garbage and table scraps are more vicious
animals than they are pets.
I pretend that the Mexican lack of respect of their dogs is a cultural thing. I pretend.
I pretend but in my heart is a growing anger at the
Mexicans. This is Easter weekend in El Golfo.
It is dangerous to to be here. For the first time in ten years
there is a contingent of police doing their jobs. The siren
blurps let you know that someone has been stopped. Mexicans come
here on Semana Sancta (Easter) hoping that one of the people that they
kill will resurrect themselves. To date this has not
happened. But then people waited a long time for Jesus.
Maybe the two or three killed on each holiday needs to be increased for
a another resurrection.
The people ignore any level of sanity. They drive at very high
speeds in their quads, 4WD, and anything else they can get
behind. You see children as young as 5 years old being tutored by
an adult. They drive on the wrong side of the street. They
park crosswise to block other traffic -- intentionally. They run
water into the street to make giant pot holes to encourage people to
drive on other streets. And this is in town. On the beach
and on the lighthouse hill, there is no sanity at all. For the
first time though the police are monitoring the main street and the
beach. Maybe no person will die before monday. Maybe.
But dogs will die. I am staying locked on my lot for the most
part. Yesterday I drove into town to the RV park and regretted
it. Two cars parked crosswise in the middle of the street to hold
a conversation decided to charge off, crosswise, as I drove by.
Neither car hit me but only for luck. I am sure they believe it
was my fault since I do not own that section of road.
My dog gets a one or two mile walk every morning and every
afternoon. This afternoon while walking my dog on his extendible
leash, a Mexican drove past clucking at my dog to get my dog to chase
him. He laughed as my dog tugged on his leash. If I had had
something in my hand to throw, I would have thrown it. The man is
the rule rather than the exception. It is part of the Mexican
macho thing: I can drive faster than your dog can run and if not, I
shall kill him. For an American education believing this is the
norm is a long stretch but I am here to tell you that almost every
driver that passed me this afternoon did something to encourage my dog
to chase him.
As it turns out, today I was attempting to teach my dog to not chase
cars. Most cars driving past the front of the lot think it is a
great joke to get the dog to chase them until the dog hits the far
fence. Teaching Bingo to not chase cars may be a losing battle
but I hope to at least teach him to stay at my side when one of these
really stupid people do something to test his limits. When the
clucker went by, I had already been quite successful in getting Bingo
to not pull away.
This is pure lunacy. The Mexicans make a big deal out of
loving and protecting life. It is a Catholic country. Lots
of babies. The lunacy is that they only look at human life as
life needing to be protected. Even their bible tells them that
they are to care for their animals. Every shepherd knew to care
for his dogs -- the alternative was to lose sheep to the wolves.
Today the Mexicans take out their macho requirement on anything or
anybody that they feel cannot fight back. This is what macho is
all about. Macho is the Mexican synonym for stupid.
Yes. I am a bit sensitive here. My dog, Dido, was run over by
a macho pickup truck driver. Dido was a Border Collie mix.
He had a passion to be loved. I write about him on other
pages. Bingo is a Border Collie mix but looks like the
prototypical Border Collie. There are American animal shelters
dedicated to the breed. I seriously dislike my dogs being
killed. If Bingo is killed, it is highly unlikely that I can get
another Border Collie and would have to settle for a just plain
dog. Why unlikely? The American Border Collie shelters will
not release a dog to live in Mexico. They do not want their dogs
killed just to support a cultural image. That Mexicans kill their
dogs just for personal image and enjoyment is not only my opinion. I
have enough to worry about and resent having to protect my dog from
such murderers.