Sick of stupid

The other day while driving to a meeting, talk radio was lamenting the suicide of a teenage girl. Apparently she took a picture of herself in the buff and sext-messaged it to her then boyfriend who promptly posted it to his Myspace and Facebook pages. The girl was so crestfallen at having millions of strange people seeing her in the flesh all over the Internet that she ultimately wound up taking her own life.

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The story illustrates the level of stupidity that so many individuals have managed to attain over the past couple of decades. And the fact that callers into the radio show were sympathetic to this Darwin Award candidate is indicative of a general acceptance of an overall lowering of the culture’s IQ. I can’t imagine how the hapless lass could arrive at the conclusion that the cheesecake shot of her private parts would remain private, given the ingredients involved: teenage boy? nudie pics? the Internet? The story is indicative of a much greater malaise affecting our culture, specifically the dumbing down of almost everyone within it. Take the poor shlubs who chain-smoked cigarettes for forty years and then decided they had been duped by tobacco companies when they found out they had heart disease or lung cancer. I suppose if you live under a rock, then there’s a chance that you wouldn’t know cigarettes are harmful. As I recall, it’s been common knowledge since January 11, 1964, When Admiral Luther Leonidas Terry, the Surgeon General of the United States, released his report detailing all the medical evidence about the harmful effects of smoking. Yet still, there’s the odd bird with Swiss cheese lungs who manages to convince 12 of his peers in a courtroom that Big Tobacco owes him a fortune because he was a customer of theirs for forty years. The area of discourse that is particularly reflective of how dim many members of society have become is politics. If you disagree with Barack Obama’s policies, then you’re a racist. If you oppose gay matrimony, then you’re a homophobe. If you’re worried about a petite 5’2” female firefighter not being able to rescue a burly 220 lb. man from a burning building, then you’re a sexist. It seems that today there are more racists, sexists, homophobes and other reprobates than at any point in history. I even had a woman accuse me of being a racist because of an article in these pages that was critical of official government multiculturalism. It seems that’s what happens to discourse when there’s nothing brighter than a 15-watt bulb in someone’s brainpan. It’s okay to debate and argue, so long as we do so with facts, rather than feelings. One of the reasons that so many battles of wits are fought with unarmed opponents is that thinking has given way to feeling. It’s much easier to feel a certain way than it is to discipline one’s self to think of why something is a good or a bad thing and then reinforce those thoughts with facts. I’m sorry the teenage girl killed herself but a slight dose of common sense might have made a big difference. Ditto for the guy with lung cancer even though I can’t imagine he didn’t know cigarettes caused cancer. As for those who would debate public policy using their feelings as rhetorical bludgeons, why not take up basket weaving instead? To tell the truth, I’m sick of stupid!