Why Can’t People Just Be Stupid Anymore?

By Ralph Appleton

BEVERLY HILLS- As many of you may know, autism rates have soared in parts of Southern California in recent years. In fact, the most recent generation of babies is four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism in certain suburbs of Los Angeles than any other part of California, let alone the country. What I don’t understand is why we have to take something perfectly normal, like stupidity, and start making excuses for it.

Back in my school days, there were plenty of kids around the school who were just stupid. There was Timmy who ate dirt during recess; there was Jessie, the fat girl who wore the same dolphin shirt to school every day; even Brad, the giant kid who freaked out when anyone touched his head. Now, these kids were a little bit weird, and the probably finished high school with a GPA around 1.7, but they spent their days learning how to behave around normal people rather than having their tapioca pudding fed to them by two dropouts from the teachers’ college with bad perms and high-water jeans like the kids who had to be strapped down to avoid swallowing their own tongues. Did Timmy, Jessie, or Brad go on to become Nobel or Pulitzer Prize winners? Of course not- I’m sure they’re stuck somewhere between part-time employee at the local library and working their way up to weekend shift-supervisor at Wendy’s. But my point is that they were treated like normal people, and they learned to behave at least somewhat like normal people.

These days, the first time a kid drools on himself or shows the signs of a lazy eye, his parents rush him to the local child psychologist who has no choice but to give the most aggressive diagnosis possible in order to avoid liability when the little idiot shoves a fork into the toaster out of curiosity. The parents are depressed and go through the motions of being in denial- don’t get me wrong, I would be pissed if I had a retard baby, but I also wouldn’t go out of my way to get him classified as such- while they secretly feel relieved that biology has excused any mistakes they made. Diagnosing the kid with autism takes the parent off the hook, you see, because there was never anything that could have been done to prevent the kid from being stupid.

[RIGHT- Dumb kid, or autistic kid?]

So now we’re left with a whole society of developmentally disabled kids who need thousands of dollars in government services in order to become disabled adults who need thousands of dollars in government services. Can someone explain to me how this is better than just letting them be the dumb kids in class? Don’t try to make it a stigma thing, because I assure you that there’s no worse stigma in 7th grade than being retarded. Well, unless you’re the kid who had to do a math problem on the board with an obvious boner- that might be worse. There are plenty of parts of the country, and even parts of California, where the first inclination is not to run to the doctor to get the kid diagnosed with autism to make it look like his stupidity is not the parents’ responsibility. Florida’s 4.2% rate of autism diagnosis makes California’s double digits look absurd- is there really something in the water that’s making all of our kids retarded? No, Florida just has the good sense to teach these kids to grow up to be unemployed adults in wife beaters who live in motor homes with a full set of ratty furniture in the front yard- meth addiction optional. So maybe Florida doesn’t have it all figured out, but at least they’re not wasting millions of dollars treating people who could contribute to society in some way. As the great Judge Smails once said, the world needs ditch diggers too.

Some people like to blame vaccines for the high rates of autism in California, even though the studies that initially suggested that hypothesis have been completely debunked. Even if there is a 1 out of 10,000 chance that a kid gets autism because of taking a vaccine, society decided a long time ago that the risk is preferable to everyone having mumps. Have you ever had mumps? No, so I don’t want to hear you bitching about it. If that were the case, then the rates of autism would be the same everywhere. It’s not the stripper with the GED in Jacksonville who is worried about the vaccination risks; it’s the uptight housewife in Glendale who saw Jenny McCarthy and her retard baby on The View. And guess which location has higher rates of autism. That’s right! The ones who have the vaccinations! Not only do the kids with vaccinations not have autism, they also don’t have mumps, so shut the fuck up.

It’s not just stupidity that’s being explained away by junk medicine. Think back to when you were in school. I guarantee there was a fat kid in your class who faced relentless teasing every time he tried to eat. Maybe it made him develop a sense of humor, maybe it helped him grow a thicker skin, or maybe it caused irreparable emotional harm. In any case, that kid does not exist today. Instead, there are third-graders suffering from diabetes. That’s not an excuse for being fat! Diabetics are old people with compression socks for their swollen ankles, giant wrap-around sunglasses, and 8-volt Rascal scooters, not kids who eat too much cake. Get your kid to stop playing Call of Duty and drinking Fresca a couple afternoons a week and send him to the YMCA and see how his diabetes are doing then.

Maybe I’m getting off topic here. My point is that people need to stop freaking out and finding a medical diagnosis for everything that goes wrong in life. Sometimes you have kids who turn out to be smart, sometimes you have kids who turn out to be stupid, and sometimes you have kids who turn out to be completely fucking Rahm Emanuel. The sooner we accept that, they better off we will all be. And the mindset that every stupid kid must have some medical diagnosis to legitimate his condition is, in a word, retarded.