You Just Can’t Fix Stupid

If you’ve read much of anything I’ve written here, or if you know me in person, you might have figured out that I have a low tolerance for people who bring things on themselves and then try to blame something or someone else.

There is a news article out today about a 30-year-old mother of eight children who died of a heart attack in 2010. Experts are saying that her 2-gallon per day coca-cola habit may have contributed to her death. You think?

Her partner said that she had other “bad habits”, such as not eating much, and smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day.

C’mon, I’m sure her family was grief-stricken, but how smart can a 30-year old woman who has eight-children already be? Add the lousy diet, the addiction to cola and cigarettes and the lack of exercise and what you end up with is a very slow suicide, right in front of your eyes.

Another article in the same vein comments on whether or not sugar should be regulated by the government, as is alcohol and tobacco. Just as you cannot legislate morality, you also cannot legislate common sense. Having a government regulation to control a common food item is just one more measure of how far in decline our civilization has become. I mean, really? Sugar isn’t bad for you, if you exercise any degree of common sense in consuming it. I’d bet if you consumed a half-gallon of honey every day it would mess you up just as badly as refined sugar. Where is the clamor to regulate our consumption of honey?

Then there is the British teen who was hospitalized after eating nothing bug chicken nuggets for 15 years.  Are we going to blame the nuggets? Her parents should be jailed for child abuse and neglect. Sure, children are finicky eaters at some points in their lives, but good parenting gets you through those phases, and you end up with children who eat healthy food because they like it.

I don’t have much sympathy for the lady who sued McDonald’s in 1994 because of the burns she got when she spilled hot coffee in her lap. I understand it was a jury that did the evil deed of rewarding her, truly an example of a jury gone horribly wrong, but honestly, any person who reaches adulthood without understanding the pouring a hot liquid in your lap is going to hurt has deeper issues than they might realize. Why is it the fault of the person who made the coffee and sold it to you that you spilled it in your lap?

Should we sue the manufacturer of the kitchen knife with which we just sliced off the tip of our thumb? How about the manufacturer of the water heater in the basement because you scalded yourself in the shower?

These are the kinds of things that annoy the living beejeezus out of me, and that they manage to get these stories in print or on the news is even more frustrating. If these stories were reported as tongue-in-cheek, funny, ha-ha kind of stories, I’d understand, but when an expertly coiffed, deeply tanned reporter, wearing a thousand dollar suit leans forward in their chair, and gazes into your living room and reports this crap as serious news, inferring that the person was actually an intelligent being who is suffering through no fault of their own, it just encourages others to go public in a like manner.

I really don’t understand how a lot of these people managed to make it to adulthood. It doesn’t help that our educational system is now based on making kids not feel bad, so it doesn’t matter if they think 2+2=5, we pass them along with their class so they won’t feel bad.

Bah. Can we get a do-over? Roll the country back to 1975 and start over? Something went really wrong somewhere in the 80’s …or the 90’s, or the 00’s. Not sure exactly what, but it was somewhere in there I’m sure.