The Three Levels of Stupid

Something that occurred to me this morning is that when I see anything that has to do with stupidity, and frankly, I see a lot of it every day, like we all do, I tend to separate myself from it.

I put the stupidity at arm’s length and look at it and sometimes laugh and sometime cry and sometimes get pissed and sometimes just shake my fuckin’ head and wonder why.

The Everyday Stupid

The simple fact of the matter is that the stupidity is not separate and distinct from me. I am an active participant. I have done my share of stupid shit, and though I’m not proud of it at all, I believe that’s an important part of how we learn.

Back in the day, when I used to drink a little after work I wouldn’t think twice about getting on my bike in the middle of late rush hour traffic in downtown Toronto. This never actually turned into any sort of tragedy, but, I always got shit for it when I got home and accused, and rightly so, of true stupidity by the woman who knows me best.

Every day we exhibit little bits of stupidity, and then quickly correct them. Today for example. I like to have peanut butter on my toast in the morning. So I got out my new “Natural” (LOL), jar of peanut butter out of the cupboard. Now I know that when peanut butter has the word natural on it, that means that there will be a layer of peanut oil on the top and that you should open it carefully so you don’t lose any of it.

I stupidly ignored what I was actually telling myself and what do you know what…peanut oil fucking everywhere. Since I talk to myself a lot, the first words out of my mouth were…”You stupid shit” Jim.” And frankly, no truer were were ever spoken regarding that stunt.

But…

While there is a marked difference between the stupid shit we do in little ways every day, and being a complete idiot all the time, the fact remains that we all have at least some stupidity in us.

And no matter how smart we think we are, we will continue to do stupid shit until we are pushing up daisies.

The Chronically Stupid

There is a class of people in any given society who are chronically stupid. There are not a lot of them relatively speaking, but everyone knows at least one person who would fit that description to a T.

These are the people who will get their tongue stuck to metal fence pole on a very cold day. People who cover their whole bodies in tattoos that don’t really have any significance to them. People who will let other people film them having sex and then allow that stuff to be posted on porn sites. People who bad petty criminals. And people who create epic fails out of stunts they are doing to impress people on social media.

This list goes on. But I do believe these people are mostly a danger to themselves as opposed to society. These are the people we look at and feel much smarter in comparison to. And I guess we need that somehow.

The Big Time Stupid

These are people who aren’t actually all that stupid, but fuck up in a big way, and end up paying for it for like ever.

A good example of Big Time stupid that I saw recently was this Jussie Smollett character, who is an actor a TV series called Empire, which I tried watching but found it kind of over the top soapy.

Evidently he hired a couple of guys to fake a racist attack on him so that he could make some sort of ‘Black Lives Matter’ type of statement and get some free publicity. Who the hell knows what other reasons he might have had.

But…and there’s always a but, the guys here hired to stage this fake attack where not white. Duh. And on top of it all, he paid these guys with a fucking personal cheque. DUH!

Now this is big time stupidity.

And then of course we have the big daddy of all the Big Time stupids, Donald J. Trump.

Nobody needs me to tell them about all the stupid things he has done. Even some of the Republican politicians who supported him are starting to get it and break ranks because of all this shit.

And you know, it’s not the stuff that he does…stuff that weakens the democracy that the US used to be and can be again once this is over. It’s not the obsessive behaviour over things like a border wall that nobody needs or any of this other silly shit he thinks is so necessary.

His stupidity all boils down to allowing himself, through his monumental greed and arrogance, to be conned by Vladimir Putin, and put into a position where he would have to do whatever the Russians want him to do, because the consequences of defying them would be much greater than actually doing their bidding.

Nobody really knows what specifically the Russians have on him, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that virtually every move he has made in the past two years regarding Russia has benefited them in ways both large and small.

And all because he is just plain Big Time stupid for having allowed himself to be compromised in that way.

The Thing About Stupid

We, meaning you and I, will continue on bumbling around doing stupid little things for the rest of our lives. It’s inevitable. If you have a day where you don't do some stupid little thing, give yourself a star.

The Chronically Stupid will continue to be that way, and as they disappear new ones will come along to replace them. My best advice is to stay out of their way.

The Big Time stupids are the ones you have to watch out for because these are the ones that can wreak the most havoc on the world. And, sadly, like the Chronically Stupid they will always be around to provide the big challenges that the rest of us have to overcomes.

So there you go, another Friday rant is in the books. Hope you enjoyed it. I sure did. My head hurts a little bit less now.

jim out.

You can follow Jim

On beBee: https://www.bebee.com/bee/jim-murray

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-murray-b8a3a4/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jimbobmur

On Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/y97gxro4