“Stupid Is As Stupid Does”

 

I have too much time on my hands. I overthink. That’s always bad, overthinking. Thinking can be bad for you.

 

I get frustrated when I overthink because I notice all the stupid people. Stupid people drive me up the wall.

 

Dogs, they’re OK. You don’t expect a dog to be brilliant. Cats, birds, goldfish — your expectations are pretty low for animals. If the dog manages to wait to pee until it gets outside, that’s pretty much all you can hope for. Anything more than that is just gravy. It’s hard to be disappointed by a dog.

 

But people, I expect more from people. I expect them to be smart or at least have enough brain power to defrost a burrito in a microwave without first watching a YouTube video. But they’re not. Half the time, they can’t even figure out how to use YouTube in the first place.

 

They’re a constant, searing disappointment!

 

“No, moron, instead of killing six postal workers and then killing yourself, wouldn’t it be much more efficient if you just killed yourself first and saved all that effort?”

 

I could take it if I only had to deal with the occasional moron, but they’re everywhere! You can’t escape them.

 

True story: A guy goes into a Walmart and tries to buy five hundred dollars worth of stuff with a fake million-dollar bill. Idiot! How the hell do you expect them to make change? What, you think that the eleven-dollar-an-hour cashier’s got $999,500 in her drawer? Would she whip out a pen and write you a Walmart check for $999,500?

 

And you know the thing that gets me? We have no scale for stupid people. There is no measuring stick for stupidity. For intelligent people, sure. “She’s a genius. He’s a real Einstein.” But what’s the measuring stick for stupid people?

 

If intelligent people are measured by the term “IQ,” then maybe stupid people should have an “SQ” — a Stupidity Quotient. 100 could be an average level of stupidity. If you call someone with an IQ of 150 a “genius,” what’s the name for someone with an SQ of 150? Moron? Pinhead? Birdbrain? Is a birdbrain brighter than a pinhead or dumber than a moron? You see, there are no standards at all.

But maybe a straight numerical scale is the wrong way to go. Perhaps we should designate a particular person as representing some fundamental unit of stupidity.

If we made him the Unit of Stupidity (UOS), we would have a scale against which we could measure other stupid people.

 

I’m now accepting nominations for a real person whose name we should use for the benchmark unit of stupidity. And don’t say “Donald Trump.” Being stupid is entirely different from being dishonest, dishonorable, and mean. The first is an accident of birth. The second is a lifestyle choice.

 

I hesitate to post this opinion on social media. I say that explicitly because I don’t want people posting comments like, “If you don’t like stupid people, you must hate yourself,” “How can you tell?” or similar misguided remarks.

 

If that happened, I’d have to counter-comment with something like, “Hey, this column is satire, humor, fiction, which Homer Simpson would have known without me having to tell him,” that would have been mean.

And mean people also piss me off, so there’s a risk of sort of a vicious cycle there, which I would like short circuit before it even begins.