I have long held a low opinion of my fellow Americans - present company excepted, of course. I am sure it can be extrapolated to all of humanity but my only frame of reference is America and Americans. I’ve never spent enough time anywhere else to form a similar opinion.
Though the thought did cross my mind when I was hiking in Patagonia that Chileans seemed to like to carve trails that made no sense unless you were to assume the trail builders were demented, prone to masochism or sadomasochistic. And, when I was traveling to Costa Rica by bus, I remember my frustration with all of the Central American countries seemingly designing border crossings to be as arbitrary and exasperating as possible. I’ve since realized that border crossings the world over are meant to be arbitrary and exasperating.
When I first heard of the Darwin Awards, my thought was it would be a good thing to chronicle the utterly stupid means with which idiots manage to remove their genes from the gene pool. It gave me hope humans might learn some valuable lessons. Alas, the Jackass movie franchise gained astounding popularity and, the next thing you know, crazes like the TidePod challenge flooded the internet.
Alas, there are just too many of us hellbent on embracing our inner stupidity.
To be fair, I have had a few times when I only failed to qualify for the Darwin Awards due to dumb luck. The dumbest one I can think of was when I belayed someone descending a cliff having forgotten to clip my anchor webbing onto my harness. According to the Darwin Awards official website, however, I would not have been considered because my stupidity endangered others.
Tenet Number Three: Self-selection.
Yes, that’s right. The Darwin Awards have criteria you must meet.
Prior to lengthy overnight river rafting trips we talk to the group about expedition travel protocols. Part of our discussion includes a topic referred to fondly as the “That’s Stupid” rule.
It’s pretty simple.
If you find yourself doing something stupid, where you are unnecessarily endangering your life or risking bodily harm, hours or days away from emergency care, you should cease and desist that activity.
(The Ugh and Thug - picture cavemen - method of creating firewood from logs by smashing them with rocks would be a primary example of a “That’s Stupid” activity. It might also wind up in Jackass Nine. Or the remake of The River Wild.)
Not only because it would suck to need an evacuation out in the middle of nowhere, but you are placing an undue burden on the entire group. You’re choosing to be stupid could ruin, shorten or jeopardize the whole trip. Additionally, you may be putting other people at risk because of your stupid actions or because of your fellow group members having to lug your sorry ass out of the backcountry.
On a river trip, there are plenty of risks inherent to the activity. The whitewater, the deadly insects, the venomous reptiles, the campfires accompanied by scalding hot liquids or flaming marshmallows, the creatures big and small lurking in the water from sturgeon to giardia. The list goes on. So, as you can see, there is absolutely no need to manufacture more risk. No need to go looking for a Darwin Award nomination.
Kent Chapple, who managed my river company’s operations on the Middle Fork of the Salmon for two seasons, had a customer come up to him once and say, “I want you to take me to the edge of death and pull me back.” Or something of that sort. It was Kent’s second season as a river guide and I am sure, besides being dumbfounded, in the back of his mind he was thinking, “Dude, you have no idea.”
This happened halfway down the Middle Fork, so Kent and his crew had already dodged an untold number of near-misses and disasters just in the course of business.
So, here we are three months into a global pandemic and that percentage of Americans I always thought might be primary candidates for the Darwin Awards are proving me right. Just as the advent of the internet only solidified what I had long presumed.
I will admit I’m uncertain as to whether I should attribute what’s going on around the country in regards to the push to reopen states in willy-nilly fashion to stupidity, gullibility, American exceptionalism, greed or hard-headedness. It’s surely a mixture of all of those things.
But what I am sure is, whatever transpires, it can, and will, not qualify for the Darwin Awards because it won’t meet all five of their tenets.
The most obvious qualifier being, “The candidate must be capable of sound judgment.”
That’s Tenet Number Four: Maturity.
###
Did you know there was a Darwin Awards movie? It came out in 2006 and it features a sort-of-star-studded cast. It features the JATO Rocket Car incident which - sadly - is fiction according to Snopes.
Bummer. That story really captured my imagination.
Also, The Daily’s podcast about the meat packing plant in Sioux Falls where they had 1,000 coronavirus infections is startling. Meat packing plants are being forced to remain open by the the decree of our Dear Leader.
This is your reminder that, while everything else is going on, this administration and Republicans in general continue their efforts to eviscerate what little health care we have in this country. Could be subject matter for Resistbot.