20110114

Here’s the trouble with the world… We’ve all just abandoned all, and I mean all, of our common sense. Gone, baby! We traded that sucker in for laws and rights and rules and regulations and generally stuff that make you die quicker. No, it’s even more than that; it’s stuff that makes you wanna die quicker than you already are! We had a good thing going and we fucked with it.

I’m not one to stand against change on principle, though sometimes I may appear that way. But I enjoy my own judgement over bullshit lines that have been repeated so many times that they forever remained ingrained into the collective conscience of purists everywhere. I can’t agree to the retarded slogan that change is good just like that, taken out of context. Hell no! Not all change is good. Everybody’s got the right to vote – that’s a good thing. Women can, now, have the same jobs as men – another good thing. Overthrowing a totalitarian regime – hell, yeah! But you tell me that it’s okay for guys to wear purses, now, and get their eyebrows plucked – that’s where I need to draw a line.

There have been immense advances in the field of medicine. The average life expectancy has risen worldwide. We, now, know that a lot of the shit we put in our mouths, and a lot of the shit that we are exposed to every day is harmful. But to make that jump from all of this to accusing a pregnant woman of child abuse and being a degenerate mother because she smokes when she’s pregnant… That’s a huge leap I’m just not willing to take.

I chose this subject precisely because it’s not polarizing. Everybody will get on that woman’s case. She is wrong, they’ll say. The nicotine will screw up with the development of the child. She is literally condemning her child to diseases or mental retardation or what not. We’re so quick to plump in nicotine with all of the hard drugs out there, just because some liberal health nut got a beef against the tobacco companies and managed to get the ball rolling on a media campaign, just as big, and just as influential and just as manipulative as the one the tobacco companies were running.

It’s easy, it’s comfortable to take the high ground here. The tobacco companies have become the devil, so anything that they put out must be evil. And what better image than the devil corrupting a child out of her depraved mother’s womb. The reverends will have a field day over this. But there’s one thing we’re all forgetting here. Before we knew that cigarettes are bad, there were people getting it on and women getting knocked up. In fact, whole generations up to that point have been nicotine babies. And hell, they did just fine. In fact, if it wasn’t for nicotine babies we wouldn’t be where we are today.

My mom gave up smoking temporarily when she found out I was coming into the world, but, we know now that it didn’t mean shit, because nicotine gets stored in your fat cells, and when you’re not supplying a constant dosage the organism just goes into its stash. So does that make me a nicotine baby too? I’d sure like to claim that title. But here’s an even better example. My dad, was born in 1958. His mom, was an avid smoker. He grew up to be over 6 feet tall, built like a brick outhouse and a college graduate. And no, he was not the exception. It’s not like the world was full of retards before, and now, all of a sudden, since pregnant women have given up smoking, we all started getting nobel prizes. In fact, if I were to think about it, the world seems to be more crowded with idiots now, rather than back then.

But, if there’s one thing that statistics has forever proven is that correlation does not necessarily imply causality. Just because I take a piss at 3:25 on days when I take a tram to work, and at 4 on days I take a cab, it doesn’t mean that my urination is connected to the means of transport that I choose. Why do I know that? It’s a little something called common sense. And if you just thought of a way how to argue that I was wrong, and my piss is connected to how I get to work through some third factor, like having my coffee later because I’d only take the cab when I’m already late, then, yes… You are one of the idiots that put the effort into making the world the shitty place it has become today.

Common sense is what we were using in the old days to figure stuff out. Today, we can’t do that anymore. In the old days, if you dropped some food on the floor, you picked it up quickly, looked at it, blew on top of it and ate it. Or if it didn’t seem good, you’d throw it out. But no, we just couldn’t be trusted with that, so it became the three second rule, which basically said that it was ok to put it back into your mouth if it had stayed on the floor for no more than three seconds. Now here’s the trouble with stupid rules… They can never substitute common sense (the same goes for laws too), because at some point, a situation will come up where the rules do not apply… Unless you’re a total idiot. Take this three second rule and let me see you eat something that spent two seconds on a carpet that’s fluffy and obviously dusty as hell.

You wanna say that’s a bad rule to make an example out of… Ok, besides the fact that you’re an idiot for arguing, take a big rule: Though shall not kill and show me a priest that has never eaten a burger his whole life. When Moses came back with the tablets off the mountain he didn’t turn the Jews into agrarians. If he had, we probably would have never heard of judaism, cause they would have all died right then and there. They were in the middle of the freaking desert! They had goats with them, they put them down, they had their barbecues and they made it out of Egypt alive.

If people would just use their common sense more, this world would be an ideal place. And everything starts with the little things. Let your kid play in the dirt, drink the tap water and shut up about it. He’s gonna be fine! Millions have been fine!

Let’s all take a collective day where we go by what our common sense dictates, instead of the bullshit that’s been ingrained into us over the past twenty or thirty years and I’m sure it’ll be a day when we discover we can make life a lot easier for one another.