Oh boy, is this a subject that grinds on my nerves daily. Common Sense. Too bad it’s not so common anymore. A turn signal is for turning, no I don’t want what you’re trying to sell me just what I asked for, oh you take offense to something 270 million people don’t mind? Between common sense, and the incurable disease known as stupidity, the world is in trouble unless a culling happens like nature meant it to.

Common sense unfortunately is one of those things that is typically taught by parents to their children. But since most of todays parents grew up in the sixties when their parents were being told to try all these new methods to help their self-esteem, they never learned what needed to be passed on to the next generation. The few that did get it, aren’t parents. They became successful in their careers and never could be bothered with children, so the ability to simply know when to wear a coat or to use an umbrella seems to be missing these days.

Don’t let me get off the hook totally, I have my moments of idiocy where I totally space out and don’t do something that is blatantly obvious and a three years old could figure it out. But when someone walks into a store, asks for a particular item that they need to finish a project, for the most part, they know exactly what will, and won’t work. So when the salesman (and that term is open to interpretation) suggests something completely opposite of what was asked for, and then it’s repeated what is needed, the salesman goes into a schpiel about how much better this new product that he’s never used is, don’t you think it’s ok to get a little upset since he’s basically refusing to sell you what you’ve asked for?

On the stupidity front, why would someone pay over thirty-seven thousand dollars to attend classes that they have no interest in? I want to play with computers and ignore the lessons being taught so that when the test comes about, I fail and blame the teacher. Or the parent blames the teacher because their kid is so obviously an idiot that they should have brained them when they were two and realized that they would end up scraping grease off a grill for the rest of their life because they haven’t got the brains to further themselves beyond learning to count and say the ABC’s.

Have you ever worked with someone that you helped train them in something, and it seems like you have shown them twenty or so times in the course of a week? That’s stupidity at work. A poor ability to understand or to profit from experience is the textbook definition of stupidity.

As I see it, the combination of poor common sense with stupidity is a far worse plague than any infectious disease is. Because both are passed from generation to generation, and the ability to break from that path is far rarer than a genetic anomaly that would cause a leap in evolution.