Scenario:

You’re talking to someone, and you mention the treaty of versailles. They say “the what?” and you say “The treaty of versailles. You know, when Germany lost WWI and had to give up land and other military functions?”

and your friend just stares at you and says “…what?”. So you say “Just google it.”

Well your friend is an idiot. You should have seen that coming from the fact that they don’t know basic history. Be that as it may, you’re trusting your friend to use the most powerful search engine on earth to find things he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. So he searches “Treaty of her thighs”

Which for some reason returns THIS RESULT. No really, I was hoping it would return some porn result, and I could have made fun of that. But no, top result is an Ohio war. Which may be because I’M located in Cleveland, so google is like “You’re searching for dumb shit, here have an Ohio war instead”. But I can work with this to help prove my point.

So you told him to just google treaty of versailles, and he comes back talking about a war between native americans and white people in ohio in the 1790s. You see how wrong that went?

When you tell someone to “just google it”, you’re entrusting that the person you’re talking to isn’t a massive dumbass. That’s a pretty tall stretch these days. I find most people are completely intolerable. We have all these PSA’s that people need to tolerate other people for being different. Which never made sense to me. I don’t give a shit that you’re a different background than I am. I’m judging you for walking into an autozone and throwing bricks because they’re out of blinker fluid.

My grandma taught me growing up “If you need to raise your voice to be heard, then nobody wants to hear what you have to say. If that’s the case, you should reflect on why that is. Is it because you’re wrong about everything you say, and people have figured that out? Maybe try NOT being wrong about everything you say.”

And that’s when I watched the family interactions as a kid a little more closely. My dad would yell over everyone, and growl and piss and moan and do everything he could to be louder than his sisters, while his mom is shaking her head. Meanwhile, if my grandma tapped her glass indicating that she was to speak, EVERYBODY shut the fuck up, and the room quieted to dead silence. She spoke at a normal tone, and everyone listened to every word. My dad, who has no self reflection, no ability to judge people or situations, or reality, just yells until he gets his way…which even after he gets his way, still doesn’t work out in the end because it was the wrong approach to start with.

So to trust someone like my dad to just google things for himself, instead of just googling it for him, and showing him the CORRECT results, is something that would lead to him being 1 bit smarter than otherwise would. Over time, enough of these bits would mean he’s smart enough to start thinking on his own. THEN he can google on his own.

But right now, you’re asking a nation who just elected trump by popular vote to think for themselves. And I’m at a point where I think that’s just a bad idea. I think the collective average of society equates to a man who puts hammers in a box, and puts that box in the garage, high up on a beam, barely supported, directly over the space the car would pull in. Then when you get out of the car, and close the door, the air movement is enough to make the box wobble. The wobble is enough to make it fall. And it falls right on your head. Because you put it there. And you can’t figure out why that happened.

That’s what I think of society. That’s where I think we’re at, mentally. Partially because I’ve seen this exact scenario play out. And partially because I see these people in public, all day, you know the ones. The people who you wonder how they are able to walk properly without their brain short circuiting, and they fall more often. The people who breathe through their mouth. These are the average day to day people who are (somehow) living their life on their own.

And you want them to think for themselves, to make decisions which affect everybody else…god dammit. Why did we give Americans the right to vote??? They shouldn’t even be googling things by themself!