The Latent Anti-Stupid Gene

At some point in your life, you’ll hear (if you haven’t already heard) someone make a crack about the stupidity of the average American. “DFA” (Dumb F*** America) is the slur people often drag out to disparage the great unwashed masses who oppose their latest, greatest idea, opinion, poem, finding, theory, reform or theatrical release.

But Americans aren’t dumb. They may be distracted, misinformed or too busy to get all the facts, But on the whole and as a whole, they’re not dumb. And they recognize dumb eventually. Sometimes, they may even tolerate dumb for a short time. But eventually, they have no time for it and will go to extremes to circumvent it, even if that means breaking the law.

Take Pittsburgh’s West End Circle construction, now in it’s third year. (NOTE: Three years to fix a bottleneck is dumb.) After two-plus years of minor messes in the Circle, City engineers and other geniuses have finally succeeded in creating a mess of impressive proportions. Traffic now backs up an insane distance every day. It’s a design fiasco that is so complete, it could not have been better implemented intentionally.

This has been going on for weeks, and people have been patient. They’ve put up with it for a good long time, even though the magnitude of the mess makes no sense. But at some point, tolerating stupidity is no longer an act of patience or civility or civic duty. Patience becomes an act of stupidity in and of itself.

Today, people lost their patience with stupidity.

Steuben Street heading toward the West End Circle is diverted to one side street that hooks on to the now-lone main drag into the Circle. Problem is, coming up from the West End Valley are at least four other roads that also must now divert onto that same road. Traffic to and on the side street off Steuben backs up for well over a mile. You might expect some police officers there directing traffic to mitigate the morning disaster. There aren’t any. Which is dumb.

This morning, after creeping roughly 100 yards in 30 minutes, people started blowing through a gap in ROAD CLOSED signs on Steuben to find a less congested side road connecting further down the main drag. One car after another after another decided that the designated route was too stupid, too ineffective, too obviously flawed to observe for one more second, traffic laws be damned.

What they did was, technically, break the law – a law that mandates a behavior that is maddening, slow, inefficient and agitating. Some might call that irresponsible, selfish or even dangerous. I call it independent and wholly justified. That fierce streak of independence is in our DNA. It’s the trait brought over by the independent people that founded and built this country. It’s a virtue, a strength, a glaring positive.

It’s good to see that that gene, however latent, can still be awakened. Because with the staggering amount of stupid that’s creeping our way from Grant Street, Harrisburg, Washington and Turtle Bay every day, we’re going to need it.