The Month Of Stupidity?

Is it the prologue to The Marching Morons?

The Drive Thru at McDonalds. The total is $10.68, my mom hands the cashier a twenty but a second later finds she has the 68 cents. The cashier looks at her sadly & says, "But I already rang it in." My mom interrupts my "So do some math" retort with, "Kids these days aren't taught how to think." And she's a teacher, so I guess she would know.

Yelp.com. My name & where I work gets broadcast on some website for idiots with opinions by some fat chick whose only ID is her username & when I respond to defend myself Yelp Customer Support deletes my post & bans my account citing "personal attack." Two of my friends later post benign, positive comments in support & are deleted & banned as well, for "fraud," we think because they both posted from the same computer.

Representative Ted Poe. I receive an email entitled "A MUST WATCH!!! Wow...what an eye opener!" which turns out to be nothing but proof that you don't have to be smart or even have smart researchers to be a politician in Texas. This moron starts by grossly exaggerating a practically nonexistent health risk & ends by accusing China of conspiracy against the US via light bulbs. But what's even more stupid than this is that people believe this crap & then forward it to others. As soon as this guy started talking he sounded just what I imagined an idiot would sound like. Don't tell me no one else heard that.

One of our stupid patients. This girl won't pay her bill because even though she's got a deductible, she insists that if we just "keep on sending in claims" the insurance company will eventually pay it. And then I had the audacity to explain to her what a "deductible" means --- as if she were stupid or something! This is the girl that a few years ago called to complain about her bill... except that she had opened her mother's mail & had apparently been unable to read the name printed at the top of the bill or on the front of the envelope.

It seems to me sometimes that I live in a little cocoon of naivete, thinking stupidity is the anomaly & that "normal" people are at least of "normal" intelligence, but maybe my standards are too high. I left one of my quite lucrative jobs in 2004 solely because I couldn't handle regular exposure to stupidity there, yet the oddball at that place was me.

But is the world actually stupid? And to survive do I need more tools to deal with stupidity? Is idiocy something that I'm going to have to accept if I want to go on living? Is dysgenics here to stay?

These are serious questions. I don't know if I can do it. I just don't. I've considered that maybe it's because, in high school, I gave up tv. I didn't want to be controlled by it, & so I boycotted it (exceptions: Twin Peaks. Ally McBeal. Sex & The City. And for the record, I hate Friends.). But maybe I should watch tv. Maybe it'll teach me how to say things more nicely, or at least more effectively to the rest of the world, which is probably fairly effusively tv-watching. Maybe I'll be able to relate to other people instead of considering them blithering idiots that should be spayed or neutered.

I watched 3 episodes of House.