by Lucinda Ulrich
Daily Lobo columnist
I noticed that every channel on television keeps a little trademark in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
What could the point of this be, except to insult the intelligence of viewers? Are we really going to forget what station we are watching? Have our short-term memories become split-second memories? Are humans getting less intelligent, or is Alzheimer's hitting all-time epic proportions, striking young and old?
The more I thought about this, the more I realized this might be exactly the point of the trademark - it merely represents the new low mark in a series of societal responses to a general dumbing-down of the population.
I first noticed this trend about 10 years ago, when manufacturers began printing warnings on products like plastic bags such as: "Warning: do not swallow or ingest in any way. Do not wrap around your head while immersed in water, or allow small children to wrap around their heads unsupervised. Improper use of this product could result in serious injury or death."
The legal teams at major corporations must have decided, quite wisely, that they had better supply consumers with written warnings to prevent serious lawsuits from coming their way. Who in their right mind would let a baby play with a plastic bag? The answer is, no one in their right mind would, but, unfortunately, enough people are not in their right mind that it was worthwhile to warn them, thereby diminishing the intelligence of everyday life for the rest of us.
How did the corporate lawyers acquire this insight? Perhaps they constructed case studies of the classic archetypes of those with common-sense deficiency.
One of the more understandable of these is the person raised by television in a struggling single-parent family. This person has to engage in guerrilla warfare just to ingest enough food each day to allow him to sleep at night. Every day, he wages battle with his siblings, up to seven or eight of them, just to maintain the status quo.
This person doesn't have time for intellectual challenges - when survival is your modus operandi, introspection is as foreign as escargot. If each day consists of answering the small unknown question - "How will I eat today?" - you can be sure you're not asking the larger questions about man's role in the universe, why we are here, or why one shouldn't wrap a plastic bag around one's head.
It used to be that most children, even those with one, two or more parents or guardians, were taught to think for him or herself, most importantly about cause and effect.
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Some would call this common sense, a phrase that seems to have become inaccurate as such sense has become less than common. Still, it is one of the most important qualities a human can possess.
You can't learn common sense from an encyclopedia, but reading books certainly helps. It's one of those elusive lessons that you either learn or you don't. Some people die first, and not just from suffocation, as the annual Darwin Awards prove.
At a time when the world is more complicated than ever before and human mental ability should be evolving right along with technology, we seem to be at a crossroads between the mental haves and have-nots.
We have discovered a new kind of ghetto, the unused mind, a true wasteland of space and time and a more dangerous weapon than nuclear missiles.
Maybe it's not too late to turn this around. Perhaps we can put smart pills in the water supply to help those using forks to repair their toasters to hop along a little faster. Or maybe we can build back alley smart clinics to help the common-sense challenged to come up a couple of notches in their thought evolution. Or maybe we could reach the point where, as a society, we can survive without warning ourselves about the simplest survival techniques.
I, for one, yearn for the day when garbage bags and cleaning products can be manufactured without obvious warnings like "Do not store pets in bag," or "Do not use Liquid-Plumr as eyedrops."
Well, a person can dream.
