Rescue 911

The following is certainly not addressed to every reader, only an unfortunate few. So if the shoe fits...

Whether at work, shooting the breeze with others on these Intarwebz, or looking over the paper, the nightly news, or any combination of all of the above, a certain pattern emerges.

It's what I choose to call the
RESCUE 9-1-1 Theory
which is expressed under the following immutable equation:

Intractable forces of nature + Gross human stupidity = Melodrama & Tragedy

It is, as 12 seconds' notice will document, the entire story arc of every episode of the show, Rescue 9-1-1. And at least 75% of my job at the ER, and maybe 80% of the evening news and the newspaper, and 99.99999% of the Darwin Awards.

Some classic examples, from among hundreds of thousands, are
Cat V hurricane + retard in a small boat = ???
Rattlesnake in the yard + unattended 1 yr. old toddler = ???
And so on.

Being logical, I would thusly undertake the following excursion into examining this problem.
Accidents (all types) account for more deaths than anything but heart attacks, cancer, respiratory diseases like TB, and strokes. They're number 5 on the annual Top Ten, and have been for, well, just about ever. They kill 3 times more people than suicides (which makes the Top Ten), and four times more people than gun violence against others (which doesn't).

So looking at the formula that describes the phenomenon, there's only two things with any bearing on it.

Option One, the Unicorn Option, is to figure out how to undo the forces of physics and nature. Best wishes with that, and keep the Nobel Nominating Committee apprised of your progress.

Option Two, the DUH! Option, is far simpler, even for people who score less than 400 on their SATs.

Don't be a ginormous jackass.

Things like not surfing tsunamis, not hand-feeding sharks and grizzly bears, and other sage advice, come readily to mind.

A famous drill instructor, that everybody ever in the military had, said, "It's easy to be hard, but hard to be smart." By which he meant, stupid grows in humans like leaves do on trees.
Which explains his second pearl of wisdom, "Remember, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people."

So, if you want to avoid being a newspaper item, a TV episode, one of my patients, or a really funny story on the Darwin Awards website, don't be that guy.

I realize that many of us, if not all, are descended from the two members of the Cro-magnon tribe, known as Dances With Retards, and her mate, Runs With Scissors.

But despite the default position of your DNA, you - and all of us - can swim upstream against the tides of our own stupid, by not eating a bowl of stupid, and then doing something monumentally stupid.

So do that.

Unless it's really funny, and I either get a hilarious blog post story, or a kickass YouTube video of it in my queue, and dibs on the rights to write it up for the Darwin Awards.

In which case, I request that to properly honor the spirit of that accolade, you don't breed.