Since cancer altered my life, writing is one of the daily events adding meaning to life and helping me pass time.

Lately, I’ve noticed too much time being passed on our new president, opinions, and current events.

It is time to clear the air and let the world know something, maybe, about how to think? Ugh…this gets uglier and uglier, and when trying this subject in the past, it never came out right and the post never saw the light of day. Crap, let’s just pull the Band-Aid off and see where we go.

Americans have become stupid.

Not all of us. Most of us? Some of us? Stupidity is hard to explain without sounding like you think you’re smarter than everyone else when all you are pointing out is you know you might be stupid and others don’t know they might be stupid. * They are not smart enough to see it? Maybe, ignorance would be a better word. The best example is the locker-room guys last year who said America is “not respected” by foreign countries anymore. When asked what countries they’d visited to form their opinion, their answer was “None.” How do you measure disrespect, anyway? Or ignorance?

Hey, that got pretty close to the point. More: it’s irksome to read letters to the editor and online comments where people “know” everything about everything. No matter what their political persuasion or education. Is there really one or two people out there who know everything about everything?

Example: medicine. How many people (and ask yourself, too) know more about medicine than their doctors? Education: How many know more than the teachers? How many know more than “over educated, know-nothing, deep-state bureaucrats”?

In fact, one of our stupidest mistakes is believing because professional people don’t do what we want them to do, the professionals are the stupid ones. Recently a passenger in my car complained about a traffic circle interchange, exclaiming “What idiot designed this piece of crap?” I mentioned the multiple layers of state employees who did traffic studies, designed it, and built it. My partner’s response was a gleeful “See? Too many cooks spoil the food. I’d have done it different.” The supposition in this case was the professional engineers spent their time purposefully designing a “piece of crap” and my passenger could have done it better by himself, presumably in half the time and half the cost. To illustrate how complex stupidity is, what if he was right?

We will wrap up here, by adding stupidity isn’t really a problem unless it gets in the way of productive conversation, or wastes a lot of time with unproductive conversation. Either situation is a debatable value judgement made by either listener or talker, or both. All I, personally, ever know for sure is when someone talks and acts like they know it all, my first assumption is they don’t. Who gets to be the ass, then, you or me? (Ass u me.) As the good Dr. Wright says: “Half the people you know are below average.” And another from doc: “A conclusion is a place where you got tired of thinking.”

Let’s all do this: stop thinking we know it all. We don’t.

And don’t shoot the messenger.

PS There is an excellent October 17, 2025, opinion piece by conservative pundit George Will about “The Velocity of Stupidity”. Check it out online.

*Such a terrible sentence. Ai agrees and wants to rewrite it for me. But I know better so….