Woe! It’s Wednesday: Stupid People

 

I don’t mean that all people are stupid.

I’m one of them.

Maybe a word better than stupid is naïve. Or perhaps undiscerning.

I’m shocked at how smart, sensible, well-educated people can open their homes and their lives to evil people.

I’m thinking of the young woman who married a man with a known problem with anger management and sexual addictions. She thought he’d “changed.” Her family supported her marriage. The husband is now fired from his job, outed as a serial adulterer, and refuses to get help.

I’m thinking of the father I know, whose son is in prison because he tried to help a sociopath. Both the son and the father believed the evil man when he asked for a ride. EM killed someone and the son is now in prison as an accessory.

I’m thinking of young people who fall in “love,” get married, divorce, then repeat the pattern. I know one young man who married the same woman twice before figuring out that his intended partner wasn’t serious about marriage. Kids get married, have kids, then wonder what happened. They think it’ll be fun, that life will be so good when they’re in charge of what they do. The irony is that we’re never in charge of our own lives.

I’m thinking of the parents who let their underage adult son drink himself into oblivion every weekend but help him get his car out of the tow yard and give him a front porch to puke off of every Sunday morning.

I don’t like the word stupid, but it does seem to fit better than naïve or undiscerning.

Situations like those make me want to shake some lapels and say “Wake up and smell the applewood-smoked bacon!”