We Need to Address the Profound Stupidity That Afflicts America

[marmar]

Reader Supported News / By William Boardman

We Need to Address the Profound Stupidity That Afflicts America
Crackdown on Florida high school science student is prime example of American idiocy.

May 31, 2013 |


It's not as though a bunch of people in central Florida have been consciously conspiring about the best way to trash a 16-year-old girl's life, but the effect of their collective personal and institutional stupidity may well produce the same effect. At first there was no sign that any of them much cared, but now there's a ray of hope for a just outcome. Read on.

This cultural stupidity in Florida isn't an all-American sort of thing that could happen anywhere—and probably has in a variety of forms similar to the recent mindlessness that led school officials to call the police who called the prosecutor who decided, over the phone, to have a 16-year-old girl arrested as an adult and charged with two felonies under state law because she did an outdoors experiment that blew up an 8 oz. water bottle with the force of a small firecracker, doing no damage and harming no one.

This is the case of 11th grader Kiera Wilmot, a Bartow High School honor student with straight A's and a perfect behavior record, according to school officials. Sometime around 7 a.m. on Monday, April 22, she tried an experiment with a friend watching: she mixed hydrochloric acid (in a toilet bowl cleaner) with a bit of aluminum foil inside a plastic water bottle—a trick known familiarly as a "Drano bomb" or "works bomb." As predicted (and shown in video), shortly after Kiera Wilmot mixed the ingredients and put the cap on the bottle, hydrogen gas was produced, with enough pressure to pop the top off the bottle with the sound of a small firecracker.

Arguably, that was a stupid thing to do, at least on school grounds.

So the Question Quickly Arises, Are There Any Grown-Ups Here?

Then the adults got involved and took the stupidity to higher levels, quickly producing a stupidity tsumani of an all too familiar American kind. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/education/florida-school-example-american-stupidity

[indepat]

1. The stupidity being ingrained into countless millions of American heads through brainwashing

by religious and right-wing zealots would take years, if not decades, of re-training to return those brainwashed to some sense of reason, rationality, and reality. Prospects are not good imo.

[Loge23]

2. Horse has left the barn

It's too late to turn the tide. The country is lost.
Idiocy is in, just look at popular culture.
The government is hopelessly broken, infrastructure shot, and China is waging a successful economic war with the rest of the world.
We (collectively in the world) fucked up the environment so much that the horrendous results, played out almost daily, are now irreversible.
Back in the USA, we have a moronic feeble Senator traipsing around the world looking for a war, any war, as long as he's not in it.
The economy is so broke that recovery is only detectable in reports now. Jobs and good wages may be lost forever for most working Americans.
We imprison virtually everyone we can. You, me, the cat, the guy next door. Everyone in 2013 America is subject to arrest.
Your examples will be compounded by more idiocy tomorrow and the days after.
Work if you can, try to get to retirement in some form, stay focused on whatever makes you happy (as long it's not smoking pot since that's yet another felony)
The rest? Let it go. You can't and won't win. This isn't the America of the free and the brave anymore. This isn't power to the people.
It's come down to "belief" now - perfect for a country of puritans and zealots.

[Newest Reality]

3. I see that you have been

paying attention and have similar insights into a "reality based" perception of the situation.

Some may consider that a pessimistic and cynical, but I think that might demarcate where the various factors impinge on various bubbles of denial that some they dwell in in order to cope. I mean, know this stuff and realizing it is only useful in the sense that it does influence the decisions you make on the train as you watch the wall ahead coming closer.

Otherwise, bromides, panaceas and comfort zones are really useful, too.

[rhett o rick]

4. Damn you, damn you to hell. I was comfortable in my conservative naive bubble and you

had to go say this shit. "It's too late to turn the tide. The country is lost."

All is not lost, I still have vodka.