Of Lawsuits, Stupidity and Darwinism

My Sis-in-Law Mac was talking about a funny episode when our nephew Thomas was a kid. Mac gave Thomas a LifeSaver and he sucked it into his windpipe. Her sister, who's good in emergencies, jumped all over him, pounding his back. Mac was watching him turn blue. Their mother Alice, ran out the door into the backyard, and was running in circles yelling, "Jesus. Mary and Joseph! " over and over. Finally, after a big blow to his back, he coughed it up and it shot across the room into the sink. Everyone but Alice is alive today. It became just another Thomas Story.

Now, they probably could bring a suit against LifeSavers for not having a choking hazard warning on them. Then, they chalked it up to stupidity and accident. If looked at with a cool eye, that's just what it was.

So how much stupidity are we encouraging when people do stupid things with products and then can sue over it? And in the big picture, aren't we encouraging the survival of the Too Stupid To Live? Why isn't common sense accorded as a responsiblity of a person? Nobody yells at the kid who does stupid things these days, at least not in front of me. They get fawned over like a crime victim should be. When did it become okay to be stupid without consequences? I'm watching children grow up with full entitlement of all their behavior, no matter how antisocial or plainly moronic they behave. How can that be good?

Thomas, once he caught his breath, was hollered at for doing that. He agreed it was stupid, and he apparently never did it again, because he's still with us. He has even reproduced.

But how many of the mollycoddled will make it to the point where their stupidity alone will kill them? How long will that be? The Survival of the Fittest will have the final word. If we've become a world where the stupid will survive to reproduce, are we breeding the morons of the future? Couple that with the fact that the most intelligent people I've known didn't reproduce. Is Idiocracy inevitable?