Rewarding Stupidity

Not to be overly dramatic, but I think this is a pretty good summation of one of the major problems facing our great nation today. I'm talking about our need as a society to reward and applaud people that in yesteryear would have been either relegated to a circus sideshow, sent out on an ice floe to die, or some combination thereof. It is best exemplified in our national obsession with horrible reality / talk shows involving people so devoid of any semblance of intelligence or moral fiber that if they didn't physically resemble human beings (and even that point is contestable at times) they could easily be mistaken for an extra from Battlefield Earth. Yeah. I went there.

But every now and then, a prime example of this incomprehensible tolerance for stupidity occurs outside the realm of television, and is captured and put on the intertubes for all to see. Such is the story of young DH, whose story can be found here. Apparently, the little 4 year old was playing around the washing machine and decided to hop on in. He became stuck, and unable to free him his mother called the fire department who eventually used the jaws of life to cut him out of the washer. Happy ending, right? Well, no. See, I don't blame the kid, he was just doing what kids do best, which is be curious and get oneself into sticky situations. The mother is to blame, for her son becoming stuck is obviously the result of shoddy parenting and negligence. If she was spending a little more time with little DH and not so much with JD (yeah, you know what I'm talking about), she probably wouldn't have had to deal with having a washerbaby.

However, there's another guilty party here: the firemen. Yep. And if you read the story, you'll understand. After they freed DH from the washer, they rewarded him with a tour of the firehouse and a ride on their fire engine. REWARDED. "Congratulations, son! People have spent thousands of years developing highly advanced mechanisms to trap various types of animals, but you, a creature capable of rational thought and logic, managed to become trapped in an implement designed only to remove grass stains. Kudos to you!" Bullshit. Sure, they were just being nice, and I think that it speaks volumes on their characters that they'd take enough of an interest in the kid to show him a good time after such a traumatic experience. But that doesn't change the fact that he never would have had the privilege of riding in a firetruck if he hadn't been stupid enough to get stuck in a washer. I got stuck in plenty of things when I was little, and all I got was grounded. For being stupid. And I still haven't gotten to ride on a firetruck. So unless this kid takes inspiration from this traumatic event and goes on to invent a washer that cleans clothes and spits out stuck children, I'm sticking by my guns and maintaining that he's a lucky jerk.