Yes, I said it. Stupidity. A condition that plagues most everyone these days, it seems. Yes, myself included, so you offended pricks won’t point and call me a hypocrite when you finish getting through this entry (if you don’t happen to start crying halfway through and actually read to the end).
There are several types of stupidity that I’d like to touch upon, but I shall include my bonus advocation for the usage of the word “stupid” in addition to a lovely disclaimer after the main text so the readers don’t think I’m an elitist with no compassion. Finally, I sum up the entire entry with a “what stupidity is not” - if you find this essay tl;dr, just skim that section and you’ll be good to go. Let’s begin.
Advocation for the usage of the word “stupid”
My mother once said that while she was at a class, she berated herself by saying, “I’m so stupid, why can’t I do this properly?” and the accompanying women immediately glanced at her strangely, as if to say, “What kind of mother are you, saying such coarse words easily?” I found this slightly irksome for three reasons.
1) The word “stupid” is a perfectly simple member of the English language that doesn’t carry with it any racist, non-PC, or extremely offensive swear-equivalent connotations.
2) My mother had been calling -herself- “stupid”, which should not elicit a show of care from anyone else.
Perhaps it’s because my entire life I’ve been brought up by my parents calling me “stupid” every day for some reason or another. No, this does not count as “verbal abuse”, which I believe is a term oftentimes erroneously used. But I digress - another entry will have to come later in which I discuss my opinions on that. Back to what I was saying, however, I do not see why the usage of “stupid” should be taken so seriously by members of the population 14 years of age and older. Look, I even excluded the 13 and under era to give you sensitive people out there some consolance. If it were truly my choice I really wouldn’t care what age a person was, I would use the term at hand with them freely.
The world is not a sparkly happy place, no matter how hard one tries to make it so. One of the worst things a parent or teacher can do is paint it to be such a way by babying students/children and censoring the world around them. Granted, at a young age there is a certain level of censorship that should go on, but I really don’t think that the word “stupid” deserves the same level of censorship that cuss words do. I seriously do not see the harm in saying, for example, “Oh, don’t be stupid. You know that five plus two doesn’t equal eight,” to an elementary-age student. I don’t see a problem with my teachers exclaiming, “Are you stupid? I told you the answer to this question two minutes ago and you already forgot?” Has our society gotten to the point where it’s taboo to even -hint- at the possibility that a student is being blatantly -stupid- in their actions?
(Small digression here). My favourite class this past year happened to be computer science, and not only was it because I actually - gasp - enjoyed the subject matter and had classmates I liked, but it always felt really relaxed in that class. I could call anyone I wanted a dumbass and not have them jump on me. My teacher could freely tell Nate to shut up and no one called her out for “hurting their feelings”. In fact, if I don’t remember wrongly, Ms. Pittman has used “stupid” more than once in her verbal exchanges with us. And you know what? No one cried, and no one complained. You know what was even more surprising? We actually got all of our work done. It was a fairly good learning environment, eclectic though it was. Surely the atmosphere of the room played some part in this, yes?
“But wait, Vivi!” I can hear the feeble voices cry out. “You don’t realize that some of us are sensitive! You don’t realize that we are recovering from depression, we are oppressed by bullying and cliques and drama, we are the weak-at-heart, and we can’t stand to hear you call us the forbidden S-word!”
My response? Grow up. I mentioned before that I can tolerate your whines until you’re 14. By that time, it’s about time you look at yourself in the mirror and realize that “sensitivity” is controlled by your mind, “cliques” are a stupid almost-made-up aspect of high-school that isn’t really all that oppressive, and being weak-at-heart only shows how much you could potentially fail at life in the coming years. If you seriously can’t at least make an EFFORT to pick yourself up, there is no hope for you. Sorry that I happen to like telling things like it is instead of sugarcoating it? If you can’t even survive someone calling you “stupid” - quite possibly the faintest and weakest word used to offend nowadays - what are you going to do when you head to college and hear people tossing truly offensive terms at you? (Sorry no examples given here for the sake of semi-professionality; use your imagination.) No one’s going to be around for you to complain and cry to, and paying therapists to hear your sob stories is a true waste of money. If nothing else, use the word “stupid” as training for the bigger and nastier things life has in store. You won’t regret it.
That being said, onto the four types of stupidity that I can readily identify in my everyday life. If you happen to fit in any of these (I find myself engaging in Types B and C occasionally, but I find Type D the worst vice), please work on rectifying yourself.
Stupidity Type A, or “I just do uncool shit for the lulz.”
Probably the most blatant occurance of stupidity, making it easily recognizable. This includes people who think, “Oh, I’m going to get myself high on the day of the state testing because it’ll be amusing.” This includes people who pull out their cell phone and start trying to text inconspicuously (but end up making such a big show of it that it’s totally obvious) after the teacher explicitly told them to put it up two minutes ago. This includes sophomores who think that sticking your finger over a Bunsen burner when it’s clearly turned on happens to be an entertaining pastime. This includes freshmen who think that aiming microwaves at a wet rag (in the storeroom, where they are forbidden to be) while the substitute teacher isn’t looking is a perfectly sane idea. It actually took a minor fire to convince said freshmen that perhaps sticking random objects in microwave ovens was -not- a productive way to spend their classtime. True story, by the way; happened at VRHS just last year.
What is it about stupidity type A that attracts people? Your guess is as good as mine. I have tried and tried in attempt to understand why people do something blatantly stupid, and I can’t seem to find an explanation. I’ll just chalk it up to heat of the moment. That being said, my mother has suggested I find a softer alternative to “stupid” to use for such situations, such as “unwise” and “foolish”. I, however, think that both carry the snootiness of a 17th-century British manuscript, and would rather opt for the blunt and to-the-point “stupid”. After all, if you saw someone sticking their hand in a fire, would you calmly remark that they are doing something “unwise”, or would you just scream out, “Are you stupid?! Get your hand out of there!!”
Or, of course, you could just point and laugh. But that’s just mean.
Stupidity Type B, or “I like being annoying in attempt to put myself up but fail miserably.”
I won’t name names, but damn, I have so many friends who are guilty of this type of stupidity that it’s not even funny. I, actually, used to be a foolish practitioner of this variant of stupidity. Here’s a simple example.
The time: sometime 9th grade. The place: the hallway.
The story: I’m a loser and stupid. Jessica and I are in the play together. I’m trying to gain acceptance into the theatre department because I want to fit in somewhere.
Jessica: Hey Vivian.
Me: Hey! Um, do you know if we have play practice today?
Jessica: It’s called re-hear-sal. And you could always just check your schedule yourself.
Me: …… oh. Right.
Owned. You see, most of the time people exhibit type B stupidity when they are trying to gain acceptance or somehow show that they are “in-the-know” about something. So they would ask about things that they either already know about or could very easily find out themselves. Here are a few more prime examples from my real life experience.
Male friend: *pats me on the shoulder* Haha, and you can’t forget about this specific incident at State science fair 2006, that was hilarious!
Me: … WTF, you weren’t even at this school for State science fair 2006, how would you know anything about it?
Female friend: I’m typing up notes for my advanced biology class. By the way, what’s the name for the storage pockets in a eukaryote cell? Vacuoles?
Me: <link to Wikipedia entry about eukaryotes>
Female friend: Is there something wrong with me?! I shouldn’t be able to memorize three pages of Spanish conjugations in only 10 minutes!!
Me: (The fact that you’re worried about this apparent skill is already enough wrong about you..)
Hopefully you can see a pattern now. This type of stupidity is rather annoying because it’s not even true stupidity; it’s a person trying to FAKE stupidity in order to hint at their supposed underlying intelligence or in-group status. Unfortunately, reverse psychology is not elegant when it is blatantly apparent and easily evaded.
Stupidity Type C, or “I can’t seem to accept things that are plainly in front of my face.”
This is the stupidity that makes you want to pull out your hair in clumps. This is the stubborn, slap-in-the-face kind of stupidity that usually leaves my mouth gaping in awe, wondering how the average IQ of American manages to even reach 98. The simplest example would be showing someone an apple, showing them encyclopaedia articles on said fruit, bringing in a professional to confirm, saying over and over, “This is an apple”… and having them shake their head and insist that it is an orange.
Yeah, old habits die hard (whoever coined this idiom had terrible English grammar skills btw), but at some point one surely has to step back and realize that they are -wrong-, right? The true test of stupidity comes when someone is insistent that their method of thinking is incorrect despite supporting data, significant statistics (no, let’s please not go into how stats are a bunch of BS, that’s for another entry), plenty of visible evidence, and proof through experimentation. Yes, I am looking at you people who claim evolution is a farce, that still believe Windows 95 is an efficient computing environment, that insist you’ll never use math “in the future”, and that insist the idea of a benevolent/omnipotent “god” is proveable because of the sole fact that “the Bible says so”.
No, I did not mean to take a direct stab at organized religion. I apologize in advance for anyone who feels the need to comment about my atheist tendencies and encourage you to please take the anger of your offended gods somewhere else. I do invite comments about your OS of choice, however.
Stupidity Type D, or “I’m stuck with a 5-year-old mindset and can’t attempt to figure something out by myself.”
Ahh, yes. My personal pet peeve. More than the other three types of stupidity, THIS is the one that best sums up my opinions of the plague. For this one, I’ll use a personal example that involves.. my OS of choice, coincidentially.
I started messing around with Linux late last year, actually - my first distribution was Kubuntu (these is all arbitrary details - if you don’t understand my lingo, it matters not; you’ll understand the main point if you aren’t stupid). At the time, I was, to put it simply, a noob. I was clueless. I had no idea the first thing to do with my new OS, and if I had been a stupid loser, I probably would’ve felt so helpless I would’ve broken down and shoved Windows XP back on my hard drive.
Rather than have that virus (er, non-virus) on my laptop again, however, I decided I’d actually attempt to be independent. As a result, I read tutorials on how to do things. I explored new resources. Whenever I ran into a problem, I thought through the process and when worse came to worse, I merely asked my deity of choice Google. Instead of running to someone whining about how I “didn’t get it” or asking questions about the most stupid of things, I tried to figure things out for myself, and because of that, I was able to learn a lot more than if I had simply ran to get help.
This doesn’t just apply to learning curves for a new piece of software, technology, or equipment. It applies, very much so, to school itself. For example, if we learn something in class that I don’t understand, I first try to figure it out myself, or I go to my friends and we figure it out together. Those methods of learning are all more beneficial than simply waddling up to the teacher, saying, “I don’t get this problem”, and jabbing at one specific question. In the latter case, all I get is one explanation for one question. In the former, through exploration and self-teaching, I could probably get the answer for that one question, and end up learning a lot in the process about what works and what doesn’t. Now that I think about it, that was exactly how our computer science class worked. No wonder I actually - another gasp - learned something in that class. And not only did I learn simple information like how to correctly syntax a print statement, but I was also able to combine this with previous knowledge to expand and learn encompassing principles, general problem-solving methods (no pun intended), and skills that could apply not only to the one specific program we were working on, but many others that I later wrote… and I daresay many more to come.
I really don’t understand why “ask for help” is the first thing students are encouraged to do when they are unable to solve a problem. It really sets the wrong mindset for the student. Instead of emphasizing the fact that they should go “get help”, the teachers should really emphasize the ability of the student to figure out the answer for themselves, or to consult peers and other resources before finally going to the teacher. That being said, I don’t condemn ultimately asking teachers for help; I just dislike hastily doing so unless it is extremely necessary. Read: there is a Physics final exam in two days and you have absolutely no idea how to solve for inertia of a body of variable mass. And of course this example isn’t drawn from my life like all the others, what are you talking about… >_>
The Disclaimer, or “I’m not an elitist who sneers at mentally retarded students.”
I realize there are multiple conventional meanings of the term “stupid” that I did not refer to in my entry. The simple explanation would be that I don’t use the term “stupid” as a colloquial synonym for the “retarded”, “disabled”, or otherwise uncapable due to a legit medical reason. That being said, I really can’t blame mentally challenged people for being the way they are. They are, thusly, not my definition of “stupid”; they are merely unfortunate victims of the random properties of life, and I wish them the best. In addition, I realize some people who know of my future plans may be thinking, “Oh, you’re just acting like a stuck-up prat because you’re going to MIT and think the rest of us are unworthy ants you can berate.” If you happen to be one of these few, I would like to blatantly point out that you, dear reader, are terribly misinformed. I have possessed this method of thinking for quite a few years (yes, even before I ever -thought- of matriculating at an Ivy or equivalent) and don’t plan on changing anytime soon. I am, in addition, very humbled by the fact that I will be attending MIT and - even in real life - do not particularly like bragging or making a big deal about the fact that I was accepted. In fact, I am probably one of the least intellectually capable people to be attending that institution this coming fall, so no; I am not being an Ivy-equivalent elitist. I have great respect for our state schools and for my fellow class-of-’08-mates who are doing amazing things at local colleges (*cough*a certain valedictorian who is doing cancer research at MD Anderson*cough*). Anyone who is convinced that I am merely being an egotistical prick after reading that honest disclaimer is either 1) severely cynical or 2) stupid, type C.
What Stupidity in My Terms is Not
Stupidity does not mean not being able to solve a complex problem or not knowing something. If that were the case, many of the greatest professors, Ph.D’s, engineers, scientists, and philosophers would all be extremely stupid. Stupidity isn’t the lack of knowledge - it is the unwillingness to find the answer. Stupidity isn’t being unable to solve a problem - it is the unwillingness to try. Remember that, and you’ll know why I use this seemingly offensive word so much.
Good night.
