BY CHARLES MEMMINGER – As a strong supporter of evolution, I am intrinsically opposed to piecemeal government enforcement of certain human behavior that allows genetically-inferior individuals to pollute the gene pool by surviving situations that would have rightly snipped their branch from the DNA tree.
I know it sounds harsh, but if the human species is going evolve in a healthy, meaningful and productive way, nature has to be able to clear out the genetic chaff and underbrush so that the fittest prevail and the weakest links are deleted. For instance, if you are stupid enough talk on a cell phone while crossing a roadway on which 3,000 pound heavy metal machines powered by internal combustion engines zoom by, then we don’t really need you contributing your chromosomes to future generations. You have failed the genetic survival test. Your lack of interest of the physics involved in a collision between a flesh and blood entity and a Chevy Malibu renders you unfit for further existence on the planet.
And that’s why it is silly – and dangerous for long-term human survival – for Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi to introduce a City Council bill that would legally prohibit pedestrians from using cell phones or other electronic devices while crossing a street or highway. I know her heart is in the right place (upper left middle rib cage) but she has to realize that not only can she not protect the clueless from every possible physical harm, it’s just not a good public policy from a cosmic point of view.
Okay, so you stop the idiots from talking on a cell phone while crossing the street. But next week they are going to cross the street while eating a plate lunch or juggling cats or reading a faux-leather-bound copy of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and get squashed like the inconsequential genetic bugs they are. You can ban people from doing stupid things in an attempt to save their worthless hides but they are going to come up with tons of other stupid things you couldn’t even think of. For instance, a Minnesota guy was struck by a car and killed while filming – wait for it … wait for it .. wait for it – yes! a pedestrian safety video. For real. Google it. Now, Ms. Kobayashi, with best intentions, could introduce a bill banning people from filming pedestrian safety videos on roadways but then someone would get run over filming a video on “Single-celled Indigenous Life Forms Found On The Center Line of Kunia Road.”
And if you somehow found a way to protect every idiot pedestrian (opposed to smart pedestrians with such finely tuned survival instincts that they SPRINT through crosswalks while eyeballing every moving object within 800 feet like an air traffic controller) then you’ve got all the idiot DRIVERS you have to pass laws to protect. We’ve already passed laws banning the use of cell phones and other electronic devices while driving a vehicle but I saw a guy juggling cats while steering his Toyota Camry down Alakea Street and he almost ran over a jaywalker eating a plate lunch. Thankfully, someone shooting a video on “The Dangers of Standing in Bus Stop Tow Away Lanes” caught the whole thing on tape seconds before he was knocked into Honolulu Harbor by a city bus.
The point is that legislators should not be in the business of passing laws that endanger the health of the human gene pool. If they do, we will find ourselves in a period of devolution. In fact, there are signs that we are already there. In Alaska, it’s legal to shoot bears, but it’s illegal to wake up a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph. See? That’s just wrong from a evolutionary point of view. The human species is much better off populated by people who shoot bears instead of those whose instinct is to wake them up. You can make it crime to wake up a bear but then they idiots will go wake up mooses.
In California, it’s against the law to ride a bicycle in a swimming pool. Do I have to explain why it’s a bad thing to keep certain people from trying to ride a bike in a swimming pool?
In New Jersey it’s illegal to slurp your soup. That’s just insane. Why is the government protecting soup slurpers? In a natural world interested in the survival of the fittest, soup slurpers should be shot on sight.
Scientists recently revealed that blood tests can now predict the life expectancy of individuals based on the length of little thingies on the tips of their chromosomes – the shorter the thingies (called telomeres) the shorter your life. People with shorter telomeres in their white blood cells are more likely to develop illnesses and die earlier. I don’t need to look at chromosomes to predict how long someone is going to live. If a person is a soup-slurping, bear waker-upper who rides bikes in pools and talks on cell phones while crossing the street it doesn’t matter how long his telomere thingies are. That person isn’t long for this world. That is, as long as the government minds its own business and lets nature take its course.
Enjoyed the satire!
OK. As i made a legal left turn, i’ve suddenly met a pedestrian in front of my truck, crossing illegally while talking on the cell-phone. It’s not the idiot that would have been killed. I slammed my brakes in time, only to realize i’ve just put myself in front of incoming traffic, over pavement covered with gravel from an adjacent unpaved parking lot. It is not that we would hurt or kill the pedestrian and limit their reproduction (imagine how many offspring in 1000 years), it is that totally innocent drivers get jailed, or put themselves at great risk in traffic, in order to avoid hitting the pedestrian.
By the same argument of evolution, we could take over Iraq altogether and solve our oil crises in one single day, with the resulting benefit of obliterating weak cultures from the face of the Earth – but that’s sarcasm, not satire.
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