I read the UK government’s ePetitions website, and I do so as a hobby.
But, Sir… started life as a hobby. Friend and fellow Jump Leads writer Andrew I both followed the RSS feed for the ePetition site in Google Reader and we’d often share the more ludicrous petitions with each other. The idea hit one one day that rather than just pointing them out to each other like children passing notes around class, why not collate them in a blog for everyone to see?
Since then reading through the petitions has changed for me. It’s no longer a way to kill time. It’s almost a job. It’s something I enjoy doing a lot because, in all honesty, everybody likes to make fun of stupid people. Recently, however, it began to sit uncomfortably with me. “How on earth,” I’d ask myself, “Can there be this many stupid people living and working in the UK?”
Indeed, idiocy is all around us. Here in the US we have to deal with morons like Orly Taitz and the Birthers, and the Healthcare Reform nuts who believe that Obama is going to send “death panels” to their grandparents’ houses to shoot them in the head. Or whatever. Indeed, there is a public perception amongst the rest of the world that America is full of mindless, gormless, overweight neanderthals who barely have enough power in their minuscule pea-brains to recall even the simplest of PIN numbers. Y’know what? I’ve lived here for over two years and I think that I’ve personally encountered more morons in the UK than I have in the US. The problem, really, is that the American morons get more news coverage – well when a country elects a complete and utter bollock-brain like Bush twice, they’re bound to get weird looks.
British citizens like to look down on America, as though it were a less intelligent nation. But the simple truth is this: “Like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere.” The UK is not full of… actually, Americans, you should take note of this as well. The UK is not full of tea-drinking, wine-sniffing, witticism-spouting intellectuals who gather around a fine wooden table to discuss Matters of Great Importance. Not everybody there knows what a bidet is. Many of them have never even seen the inside of a Parlour, nor looked through the single lens of a monocle. The UK isn’t full of anything. What it has, just like any other country, is its fair share of smart people and its fair share of morons.
The balance has always seemed off-kilter, and this is usually because idiots are louder. America has its Town Hall meetings where ignorant, gun-toating Beckites shout idiocies and moronisms at elected officials because they’re terrified that their healthcare system might be improved, and the UK has the Government ePetitions site and the BBC’s Have Your Say pages where our own special breed of idiot can shout more or less the same stupid comments either directly at the government or the internet in general (incidentally if you want to see real lunacy in action I’d suggest you check out spEak You’re bRanes, which does for the Have Your Say comments what we do for the ePetitions). This sort of halfwit has existed since long before our time. We’ve had idiots for decades. Centuries. Millennia. The only difference now is that they’ve been handed a worldwide platform for their mad ravings. Used to be you just stood on a street corner and told people that we should bring back Crucifixion. Now you can get on television and tell an entire nation, or jump online and tell the world.
Reading the ePetitions site might be enough to drive a lesser man into a pit of cynicism, depression, and a sort of general bitterness for the human race as a whole. Despite my bitter ranting in the last couple of paragraphs I feel I have to make it clear, I don’t despair for the state of the human race. I don’t lay awake at night wondering what’s become of us. I may well have a deeply-routed antipathy for the willfully ignorant, but that is not a label that can be applied to humanity as a whole. Me? I love the human race. We’re fantastic! How can you not love a world were an overworked, underpaid supermarket soda monkey does this with his spare time? Or where a lover sends his other half bits of card to tell her how much he loves her?
People – cynical, jaded people in particular – seem to forget that just as human beings are capable of great stupidity and horror, so are we capable of remarkable intellect and acts of incredible kindness. For every Charles Manson there is a Danny Wallace, for every Fred Phelps there is a John Lennon (which logically means there’s also a Yoko Ono, but let’s not think about that).
You can’t ignore that there is so much bad that goes on in the world – the media makes sure of that – but you mustn’t forget that there’s a lot of good going on as well.