Embracing Ignorance

I want to write to you about something that has been bothering me for some time now.  That something is the fact that now a lot of Americans think it is stylish to be uneducated, unaware, and generally obnoxious.  If you fall into this category of Americans, you need to decide whether to read on or go polish the mud flaps on your pickup truck instead.  If you are one of these people and are easily offended, I'd recommend working on the mud flaps instead of reading on.

Over about the last ten years it seems like I've been encountering more and more of these people.  When I was much younger we were taught to be inquisitive, embrace learning opportunities, and value knowledge.  Even knowledge we knew we'd most likely never use.  When we found that we really didn't know something that we should have known, we did a pretty good job of not letting anyone know that we didn't have that particular pearl of knowledge and then we went and learned it on the sly so we'd have it available for next time.

Today things are different.  More and more often I hear things like "I don't know nothing about that" and "Who cares as long as I have a big screen TV" and "I have a constitutional  right to...blah...blah...blah."  The whole "constitutional right" thing is a subject for another post so I'm not going to get started on it here, but just suffice it to say that's the one that makes me livid every time.  A chance encounter with an individual of this mentality during a  visit to the grocery store yesterday was what compelled me to make this particular post.  

In case you happen to be reading this at some future date, most of the world is currently being impacted to some degree by a coronavirus pandemic.  A lot of people have died from it, a lot of people are sick, and most of us are scared shitless over the whole thing.  Omaha, the city where I live, has restrictions in place that have closed restaurants, bars, and most any business where people congregate and generally just hang out near each other for any amount of time.  Financially it has been very hard on many residents and local businesses and it has been an inconvenience for most of us in some way.  

Grocery stores are impacted by the pandemic to some degree, but they are not closed.  Customers who typically shop for small amounts of groceries several times each week are trying to limit their possible exposure to the virus by going as infrequently as possible and buying enough stuff that they don't have to go back in a day or two.  We frequent several different grocery stores, but I chose this one yesterday because I had a prescription ready at the pharmacy, so I decided to just shop for groceries while I was there.  I will say that this grocery store is not my favorite because they are much more expensive and I think the company is kind of shifty. Most grocery stores lowered prices when the pandemic hit in order to help their financially-strapped customers, but these guys raised them instead hoping no one would really take notice.  In retrospect, I should have just picked up my medication and driven the six blocks to another grocery store, but I guess then I wouldn't have been compelled to get this off my chest and share it with you.

This particular grocery store had decided for some reason that the best way to combat coronavirus was to make their aisles one way.  To get to an item in a particular aisle you have to be moving the correct direction or the grocery police will immediately come to you and let you know that you are a violator.  If you happen to pass an item that you intended to buy, you can't just turn around and go back for it.  You have to continue to the end of the aisle, go up an adjacent aisle, and then make another pass though the aisle where your item is located, hopefully remembering to grab it this time.  If you think this can be confusing, you're right.  It's like when a pilot is trying to land an airliner and realizes that he's coming in too high so instead of landing anyway he gives the plane some gas, pulls up, and circles around to try it again.

Ok, back to my story.  I was going down the aisle with baking supplies and spices in order to get to the end and turn up an adjacent aisle where the item I wanted was located and I ran into a guy and his daughter coming toward me the wrong way.  He was pushing the cart down the center of the aisle with his rotund body swaying side to side in what best could be described as an over-confident swagger.  She was running behind him trying to get him to put on a medical mask and shouting about coronavirus.  He had the usual shorts that went to his ankles, untied high top basketball shoes, a sleeveless t-shirt that read "Protected by Smith and Wesson," some scraggly facial hair, and what may have been a MAGA hat but I'm not sure because he was wearing it backwards.  The grocery police were nowhere to be seen.  I would have expected them to be all over this flagrant violation of their new grocery store traffic rules.

What triggered me to actually sit down and write this post was when I heard his reply to his daughter's pleas for him to wear a mask.  He said to his young daughter "I don't need no fucking mask!  Ain't no goddamned fucking coronavirus gonna get me so shut the fuck up."  Of course this all came out at a volume level sufficient to be heard for three aisles in either direction.  As we passed each other he looked me in the eye and said "What??" with a mildly disturbing level of animosity.  My immediate urge was to grab a Pyrex baking dish off the shelf and beat him to death with it before continuing with my shopping, but I decided not to engage.  I figured he would probably remove himself from the gene pool eventually anyway, maybe by following our genius president's recent advice to drink a bunch of Lysol.  Throughout all this I did not see the grocery police even once.

To get back to the original purpose of my post, I can tell you that I see more and more of this behavior all the time.  And the thing is, people acting like this are actually proud of the fact that they aren't really even aware of what's going on around them and they have no desire to become so.  Our "stable genius" president has encouraged this type of living thoughtlessly, in complete ignorance, and without any consideration of others so now it's ok for them to act this way right out in the open instead of trying to conceal it somehow. I'm having a really hard time figuring this out.  Maybe you have the answer, but I sure don't.  The only thing I can think of right now is to just keep heavy objects away from easy reach  while at the grocery store and hope for the best.