Poopidity

People are stupid. Sometimes smart people do or say stupid things because they have trouble accepting alternate perspectives. Most of the time I think stupidity emanates from a combination of fear and laziness. I call this Poopidity. Noun – dumb things that are done by people full of shit.

I’ve turned on all the filters and Gmail is real good keeping the inbox clean of junk mail. But, like everyone here, I have friends and relatives that still send me retarded emails. “Be afraid of this...” “Help the Nigerian.” “Be afraid of that…” My last email wanted me to sign a petition to stop congress from giving social benefits to illegal aliens. Not a bad idea, however, total bullshit. A five minute investigation on snopes.com revealed the basis behind the protest was bunk. Call me paranoid, but I believe the petition was started by politicians to make their colleagues look bad. Whatever. I’m more interested in why the 1,000+ people that signed the damn petition didn’t think about doing this research. Spamming friends and relatives over an issue that doesn’t even exist; Poopid!

Now, a smaller example. The ex-fiancé and I both eat cereal for breakfast. She used to crumple the plastic liner down to protect the Special K’s freshness while I didn’t. I hated unraveling that crap when I was half awake looking for food in the morning, spilling shit most of the time. And she hated my disrespect for the Special K allowing it to get stale. But it never got stale; we ate it too fast. I also had to explain to her that crumpling the bag down in no way provides the vacuum seal needed to preserve food. All it did was irritate and make my life more difficult.

She didn’t want to hear that. I found out after months on ‘high fiancé alert’ that the cereal didn’t matter. It was about respecting her way of doing things even if they didn’t make any sense. I accepted that, but she was also supposed to compromise and allow me to bust her urban mythology. Never happened – glad she’s gone.

This phenomenon also penetrated America years ago and even sparked several TV shows. Urban Legends took stories like “Spiders nesting in people’s hair” and “Flashing your brights at people could get you murdered by gang members” and explained if they had merit. The show failed because it made people feel gullible. Bullshit on Showtime proved how ridiculous and hypocritical supposed good organizations like PETA and Greenpeace have become. They also crap on life coaches, pet lovers, the Boy Scouts, and recycling. Even though they got their facts straight, the show isn’t popular because it doesn’t make people feel better. Most of their shows come off snobby – funny, but snobby. Mythbusters avoids these pitfalls by presenting its material through basic science. It doesn’t try to change the world nor expect you to change your behavior. It’s popular because it quenches your curiosity. The fluff doesn’t affect your core belief system and doesn’t make you feel… anything.

I once had a bad manager tell me that it’s more important to make the client feel like you solved the problem than actually solving one. Never thought he was right until I looked around a little. Americans don’t want to live better; they just want to feel like they are living better. Is our country’s collective self-esteem really this low?

Stop the poopidity.