A Confederacy of Dunces
The title of this post is borrowed from the title of an excellent novel that is highly recommended by Papa Riah. It seemed appropriate for my inaugural post in the Idiots Everywhere category. If you are looking for a good read pick it up. The story behind the book is just as interesting as the book itself, which you can read in the forward. Although the novel is not about being surrounded by idiots, it will have you in stitches and enthusiastically giving the book to friends when you are done.
But the title of the book does accurately describe our modern society. Idiots are all around us and it seems as though there is a conspiracy against anybody who still possesses common sense. There is just no getting away from them. Idiots are on the television, the radio, live next door, and are all around you at work. Don’t look for any help from the government with them, as their ranks have been particularly infiltrated - right up to the highest levels.
Perhaps nowhere in this more evident than on the roads. Simply trying to drive to work and back or even to the grocery store without being inconvenienced by a complete dolt is nearly impossible. It is my contention that either the DMV has simply thrown their hands in the air and just started giving anyone with a heartbeat a license, or that an alarming percentage of drivers don’t even bother getting one any more.
Papa Riah lives in an area where there are a lot of freeways nearby. The most dangerous thing on these highways are twenty-something year olds who have gotten the idea that they are bullet-proof. Many of them drive lowered Hondas with tinted windows mistakenly thinking they look cool. I don’t know whether these guys are Nascar fans or have just seen Too Fast Too Furious too many times, but they are flat-out dangerous. They come out of nowhere at ridiculous speeds up to about two inches off your bumper, and change two or three lanes at a time without signalling while weaving through traffic at extremely high speeds.
The problem is, they don’t kill themselves enough. By coming too close to your rear bumper they actually end up doing a pit manuever on you, spinning you out into other lanes of traffic putting your life in serious peril. Also when they do crack up, all to often it’s an innocent driver who ends up in the obituaries. When Papa Riah learned to drive we were taught to drive defensively, but this didn’t become a necessity until this decade for some reason. Now if you don’t watch out for idiots everywhere, quite literally, one of them is likely to get you killed.