Social media makes stupid people all the more visible

I don’t know if it’s a symptom of an increasingly urban population and a decline in outdoor recreation, or if it’s always been this way. But there seem to be more morons in the world than there ever were before.

 

Maybe social media has just made it easier to broadcast the antics of idiots. Or maybe there are more idiots out there today. Whatever the explanation, though, it seems like the world is chock-full of dopes, and there appear to be more of them every day.

Last week, some doofus went viral on the internet, and then made the broadcast news, after a video surfaced of him playing bullfighter with a bison in Yellowstone National Park. The video showed him antagonizing the one-ton beast on a road where it was just trying to get from one side to the other.

Amazingly, the drunken fool managed to avoid getting gored, stomped or otherwise mangled. But his luck didn’t hold. He had already been cited in Grand Teton for being drunen and disorderly, and was fined and prohibited from drinking alcohol. He then was ticketed in Yellowstone for failing to wear his seatbelt, and then he was fined again for harassing the bison. He was later arrested in Glacier National Park after being involved in a disturbance there at the Many Glacier Hotel.

Elsewhere on the internet, a member of the “Yep! I’m from Wyoming!” Facebook page posted that a visitor to a hotel in Cody complained that the hotel’s moose-antler chandelier is “inhumane.” Apparenlty, this person assumed that the use of the antlers required killing the moose that once sported them. I believe even Wikipedia knows the difference between antlers and horns, and whether an animal keeps them for life or sheds them.

The great Mark Twain once said, “It’s better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” Unfortunately, it seems the bulk of humanity lacks the ability to remain silent. And social media is always right there to either help those people broadcast their ignorance, or to expose it for them. At least it provides a good laugh every once in a while.