You CAN Fix Stupid

With all due respect to comedian Ron White, I think you actually CAN fix stupid. I know this, because I’ve seen it happen in my own life.

I’m not much of a “fix-it” kind of guy; repairs or, even more so, actually building something, are not in my “skill set,” as the current vernacular says. Out of necessity, however, I’ve found myself face to face with a problem that needs actual fixing. My automobile has been the unwelcome recipient of my bungling, more often than I care to say. One time, I had to replace the starter on my old Bronco. Friends, this is really a very simple procedure. Take out the old one, put in the new one. Right?

Well, I got the old one out fine, and even took a bit of note regarding the connections and placement of it when I removed it. The new part was identical to the old one. But, try as I might, I could not get the new one in place, not to where it needed to be to reconnect the power lines. For the better part of an hour, I fidgeted, fudged and cursed as sweat filled my eyes and my hands became ever greasier.

The problem was simply this: I could not stop long enough to assess my situation to admit that I was doing something wrong.

Finally, via nothing greater than simple frustration, I flipped the thing around and voila, she slid right in there.

Yes, I was happy and yes, I was satisfied. But something else happened. Humility forced me to perform an outrageous task: I learned something. A couple of somethings, actually.

Most importantly, I learned (for the thousandth time, I suppose) that I could be wrong.

Ugh. Not one of us wants to be wrong. We want to be right, and after decades of people telling us that we’re winners when we come in last place, we have a certain assumption that, regardless of what we do or say, we are right! Despite statistics and evidence to the contrary, we absolutely KNOW we are right. And the longer we hold on to that ‘rightness’ in the midst of being totally wrong, the more difficult it is for us to admit it. Until it becomes literally impossible to do so.

My father was not an educated man, and he was not particularly bright. But that had more to do with a destructive and dangerous stubbornness than it had to do with his inherent ability. He stuck with the former because nobody ever told him he had the latter. I get that. But he did say something that fits in here. He said, “There’s an eraser on the end of every pencil, son,” indicating that we all make mistakes. Errors. We can all be wrong (not him, personally, but you know, the rest of us).

The Law knows this. The Law understands that we are human and frail and stubborn, and so those who make the law have tried for a century to fix stupid through legislation. But regardless of the nationwide war against drunk driving, few people stop doing it because of the Law. In the 60’s, Congress tried to legislate away racism, and you see where that’s gotten us. Even now, we have some states in which a substance once deemed to be a dangerous narcotic is now available in the free market. But those authoritarian types with a dangerous love affair with their own beliefs think this revelation is a stupid move. So far, of course, it’s been a mostly positive change, but time will tell. Should it prove to be a wildly successful kind of progress, those who are simply against it will never believe the statistics or evidence.

Which brings us to where we are today.

Regardless of whom you support for president, I’m quite sure that there isn’t a single piece of evidence—real evidence, I’m saying—that would persuade you to give your vote any more thought, let alone change your mind. Part of that problem lies with social media and even the mainstream media, of course. Lies, spins, partial-truths, misquotes, straw man arguments and—my personal favorite—broad brush prognostications should the other candidate win, ought to have all of us searching for a morsel of truth.

But that’s hard. That takes reading something other than headlines and craftily-misleading internet story titles and memes. Reading deeply into the texts takes time and energy, something a lot of us haven’t much of. But it also takes an open mind, something many of us—though unwilling to admit so—are seriously lacking.

That said, it is really the only way to fix stupid.

I think a lot of us are thirsty for knowledge, but we just wish it could come to us without our input. I’m not talking about data. We have plenty of that coming from all directions, so much so that it likely presents a formidable barrier between ourselves and real knowledge or wisdom. I also think a lot of us have a fair amount of knowledge in our brains, but the systematic and regular flood of media and entertainment stimuli that skips past our brains and makes a beeline to our hearts often relegates actual thinking to, well, an afterthought.

Which, as I pointed out above in my starter replacement anecdote, makes it almost too late.

Almost.

I beg people to stop watching television. I tell them to take a couple weeks off of social media and just experience life, your life, in your community and neighborhoods around you. Once you are not impacted by the daily stream of bullshit or emotional cattle-prodding that flows freely from these media, you do two things.

First, you feel something akin to peace and serenity. That’s a good thing for your entire organism. Second, you begin to realize that life isn’t so bad or, at the very least, that the bad stuff isn’t so widespread or prevalent as those in the business of making money off your fear make it seem.

And in that environment of peace and quiet, you can actually learn something. But, more importantly, you can do so with a sense of understanding and acceptance that we can all be a little stupid about stuff now and then.