The Merry Minuet

Allen posted an article from the Washington Post about the current reluctance of many Americans to practice common sense preventative measures when faced with a pandemic type event and how it will only create more problems when the next big outbreak occurs. 

Allen wrote as his lead at the top of the post:

"America(n)s have a very strange understanding of freedom. When the next outbreak of a contagious disease occurs, Canada better be able to slam our border with USA shut tight. It would be nice if the disease only killed Republicans and their sympathizers."

I have no argument to counter his assertion. The White Wingin Right has certainly embraced some seriously twisted notions of what freedom means to them. But it was Lori who put this mutated political awareness of the Right into the perfect nutshell. She wrote:

"Maybe the reason you can’t cure stupid is, it takes so many forms."

I busted up. Perfect. ........... Stupidity does indeed take an infinite number of forms. We have been honing our stupid skills for well over 40,000 years; probably longer. I have a feeling though, when we first started out, we were smarter then than we are now.

Fixing stupid is an exercise in futility and always has been. When I am not practicing my own form of it, I realize the only way to beat it, is out last it and survive it. Ignoring it is at one's own peril though. All too often it swallows us up into its evil slurry circling the bowl and flushes the smartest and best of us down with it.

I am not sure if others do this, but I began years ago to acquire mantras and beliefs to help find my way through the morass of stupidity I found all around me. As I became more aware of how different and odd other people could be and how blatantly and stupidly wrong they could be, I have tried to only get tied up in my own stupidity and not theirs. 

I tried to allow them the courtesy of their own stupidity without compromising my own. My mistake was not keeping tabs on the stupidity others were involved in as they sucked others into their idiocy, and before I could say, "What the Fuck", they were a movement, a grotesque snarling mass of stupidity that engulfed our country and is now threatening to turn all of us into the morons they had become long before.

The one glimmer of hope I have is that even with global busting moments of planet wide stupidity, somehow we have survived as a species. I am fearful though that at some point, as the Kingston Trio sang 60 years ago in "The Merry Minuet":

"........ Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away."

I used to believe in the right of people to be stupid. I know now stupidity is not a right we can bestow. It is part and parcel of what we are. The best we can hope is that we survive our worst moments of it.

Later .......................................

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The obvious choice for music is the Kingston Trio's rendition of "The Merry Minuet". 

I inherited or maybe stole my brother Doug's copy of their first album when I was around seven I guess. I would later own and still do have somewhere more than a few of their albums. They were not cutting edge rabble rousing pot smoking beat niks. No, the Trio wore the same button down preppie shirts and Weejuns on their feet. They looked like the guys every mom hoped would date their daughters.  Their music was safe ....... until it wasn't. I understand they received some shit for this tune.