Yes, They Are

From time to time I will get comments on this blog that I’m being too negative about our fellow people; that the common folk out there aren’t nearly as stupid as I tend to portray them, and I should have more faith in people. In response I will often quote P.T. Barnum’s famous quip “No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” to which Mark Twain is reputed to have replied “My dear sir, there is no underestimating the intelligence of the American people!” A contention which is supported by a story that came out of Phoenix yesterday…

People will tell you that I’ve been a cynic since early adulthood, but this is not true. I’ve been a cynic since early childhood, and all of that time I have rarely encountered something as randomly bone-headed as this. According to a story in the Arizona Republic a man who was waiting to exit a Delta flight at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix got tired of waiting for the people in front of him to leave, and instead opened one of the window exits and climbed out onto the wing…

He was quite fortunate not to have tried this stunt while the airplane was in the air. There isn’t the least chance that he could have gotten the window hatch opened; while the cabin is pressurized the air pressure holding those hatches in place is heavier than any known person would be able to pry lose. The much more likely possibility is that one or more of his fellow passengers might have gotten the idea that he was a terrorist trying to kill all of them and beaten him senseless – unless, of course, there was a Federal Air Marshall aboard, in which case he’d probably just have been shot…

What, exactly, this fellow expected to accomplish by ignoring every warning sign, posted regulation and iota of common sense may never be known; certainly there was no imaginable scenario in which he would have been able to safely climb down from the wing, force his way into the terminal, and leave the airport without being arrested. In fact, the odds were actually against his being able to exit the plane and the airport this way without sustaining serious injury, such as being run over by a ground vehicle, sucked into a jet engine, or simply breaking his leg trying to jump down off the wing. The subsequent arrest, trial and incarceration would have to be considered merely a bonus after that…

Of course, every one of us has probably seen examples of this same phenomenon every week, if not every day, for most of our lives – if nothing quite this spectacular. So if you’ve ever noticed all of the acknowledgements of stupidity in our society, from warning labels telling you not to use electrical appliances in the bathtub to disclaimers for every possible occasion to the annual Darwin Awards and asked yourself “can people really be that stupid?” I regret to inform you that yes, they can. And the situation is not likely to improve any time soon…