Wising Up

WISDOM IS TIMELESS, AND AGELESS. Fools and wise people alike defy demographics.  The young are often wise, and the old are often not. A young lady asserted with great confidence that the greatest British invasion band of all time was The Kinks; not the Stones, the Beatles, The Who, or Zeppelin.never mind Herman's hermits. Thus she revealed her lack of age. Yes, Ray Davies and teh Kinks.great band,granted. But, really? Still and all..Then there was the eighty seven year old southern conservative -this person really existed - who swore up and down that Abraham Lincoln and FDR were the two 'sorriest" as he put it presidents in american history. I'm sure you glean the pattern; he doesn't like people who help black people nor socialists, true to his conservative little KKK heart. The old geezer supported Trump. Go figure.I rest my case. idiots come in all genders and ages. Anyhow, he's dead now. When Trump rode the golden escalator down and declared in 2015, I got on board. Fresh blood, and all that. Within two weeks i had learned better. By that time he had called Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted" fifty times, and I realized that he would call anybody anything, and would never be concerned with my well being. I proved correct.Some folks learn faster than others. I do stupid things, but I always correct myself, at length. Einstein said that the only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius is somewhat limited.And of course everyone knows that insanity consists of doing something repeatedly which does not work the first , second, or third time. Stupidity, lack of wisdom, call it what you will, is contagious. it spreads through the community like a viral pandemic. The great American Covid 19 epidemic, itself the product of societal foolishness and partying and a refusal to wear masks and to social distance and so forth, is far from the only example.A high percentage of American, for example, claim to have been abducted by aliens, that the election was stolen from Trump, that vaccines kill people, and that there exists a widespread conspiracy to rape children and suck the blood from their bodies. Generally, it is the same people who believe all these things. The same people who  believe that vaccines are harmful are the ones who believe, so they say, that Trump lost the election only by fraud. The economic collapse, the pandemic, and the political turmoil were all cause by the same people, people lacking wisdom, stupid people. Our only comfort is that we can to a certain extent identify these people, and isolate them.