By Jim Schuh

I  hate to come off as intemperate, arrogant or mean, but sometimes, a person just has to face reality. Certain things in this world make you do that.

It may not sound very nice to say so, but there really are stupid people in this world – often, not far away.

First off, as a class of people, criminals are stupid. The fact that they’re sitting in jail somewhere is testament to that fact.  Everyone knows that almost always criminals get caught and put behind bars for their misdeeds. Consider the would-be bank Missouri robber who was drunk and passed out.  He finished his nap in jail.

None of us thinks we’re stupid when we ask someone else how they are. But if you reflect on it, asking that question has become stupid – if not stupid, certainly silly. The fact is that most of us don’t really care how you are. We just ask reflexively and don’t pay much attention to the answer. It’s a question we’ve become accustomed to ask.  And we all do.

 There’s a real possibility the person we ask will tell us – in excruciating detail.  Again, we don’t want to know.  We don’t take hypochondriasis very well. We were just trying to be polite.  Some people ask how you are, but don’t wait for you to finish answering the question before they launch into a soliloquy on the status of their own health.  We don’t want to hear all that stuff, either and consider these people bores.

Here’s a good example of why I say asking about someone’s welfare the way we do  is asinine.  In my radio days, we’d get calls every so often from a New York record hustler trying to promote a new record – that’s all he was interested in.   This dude once phoned a program director, and in his thick east coast accent began, “How ah yah?”  The program director responded, “No so good, I lost my dad yesterday.”  The record promoter quickly followed up, “Happy for yah,” and proceeded to plug his new record, totally oblivious to what the PD had told him.

What we probably should do, if we really care about another’s well-being, is come up with a better opening question instead of the bromide all of us have become conditioned to ask.  And it would be good to listen to the answer we get, too and respond appropriately and very briefly

On the subject of stupid, I’ll relay once again my story of what happened to me in my radio days.

A lightning strike disrupted electricity in Stevens Point, and knocked our station off the air.

The land line phones still worked even though the power was out.

As I sat in the darkened studio, I decided to pick up the phone to see if anyone was calling us about the interruption.  Sure enough, a woman was on the line and inquired, “Are youse off the air?”  I told her we were, because of a lightning strike, but she then posed this question: “Why don’t youse make an announcement?”

That’s stupid.

How are you at identifying top political leaders?

I once heard that if you asked 100 people on any Main Street, one wouldn’t know the name of the president of the United States.  That sounds preposterous in the age of Trump, Trump, Trump, but it’s probably true, and it wouldn’t be out of line to call that person stupid.  If you asked the identity of the vice-president, the number of those not knowing would rise (Mike Pence).  The number would jump even more if you asked people to identify the Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi, who’s second in line for the presidency.)

As good citizens, we should know this stuff but many of us don’t.   Would it be fair to call us stupid if we didn’t know at least the top two for presidential succession? Immigrants who take citizenship tests are required to know much more about our government than most of us do.