For reasons that escape reason, young people began eating Tide detergent pods and posting videos online of them eating the pods. It became a thing. Eating Tide won’t kill you outright, but it was a lot like watching the two cute chicks eating Carolina Reapers.
People do stupid things because they believe that the stupidity somehow lends them an aura of bravery or indifference to consequences.
The two women in the Carolina Reaper video suggests that this is not only untrue, but catastrophically false.
One of the first terrible things I saw online was the video of a young man on top of a three story building with a skateboard. His plan was to jump off the building, land with the skateboard on a rail below, then slide down the rail while the video was being made.
He jumped. He landed perfectly. But instead of going down the rail he went face down into the concrete. His friend behind the camera laughed then stopped. The would be skateboarder was not moving at all.
“Dude?” is the last word you hear from the cameraman before the video ends.
I think he was dead when he hit the concrete.
It’s difficult to believe people do things that are either embarrassing or painful or lethal, and have someone making a public record of it. Yet the internet has tens of thousands of videos like these. Those clips of people using a chainsaw to cut down trees that then fall on houses or cars are legion. Anyone can walk into a hardware store and buy a chainsaw, and they kill and maim more people every year than do rattlesnakes. Most people who drown can swim but they put themselves in positions where their skill comes up lacking.
The video of a man talking his girlfriend into shooting him with a .357 at short range is stunning in its idiocy. He tested a bullet proof vest at one hundred feet and it withstood the bullet. At twenty-five feet it killed him.
All of these example of otherwise functional human beings hurting themselves, maiming themselves, or others, and all of it live and on camera, is a stunning testament to the power of evolution fueled by downright stupidity. The young man launching himself off a three story building to concrete below displays an extraordinary ignorance of basic physics. His friend behind the camera laughs at the sight of a friend lying still after impact. He simply does not comprehend the danger, either. He will go to his grave replaying that day in his mind, over and over.
None of this, not one example I’ve given to you today comes anywhere close to the sheer magnitude of stupidity, or lack of understanding, or outright indifference to the lethality of what has happened when people voted for Trump.
Take Care,
Mike