People Do Not Do Stupid Stuff

Ok! I admit that the title was click-bait! But I also believe that it is true in this sense: yes, people do a lot of stuff that we might think is "stupid." But they have always justified what they are doing in their own minds. If they truly felt that what they were doing would make them look stupid, they would not be doing it. Looking at people's actions from this point of view, asking how they are justifying the apparent "stupidity," opens a new avenue of understanding about their actions and how to address them. It is really the old "walk a mile in their shoes" philosophy, but it needs to be reinforced in today's partisan ugliness that usually has people talking past each other in the self-serving drive to advance one's own point of view.
Attempting to follow this philosophy led me on a rather interesting adventure several Sundays ago. My starting point for this inquiry was the apparent disregard by the Left for the benefits of the currently booming economy, which at least for me, was creating the demand for many new office spaces served by vast expanses of windows through which the natural lighting would flow to illuminate otherwise dismal cubicles. New construction is happening everywhere, and unemployment is at historic lows. Who could be so "stupid" as to feel that this is a bad thing? In casting about in my mind for a reason for how the left could be feeling like this, I happened to remember a view that had assaulted my eyes upon emerging from the north end of the Lehigh Tunnel on the turnpike years ago. Fifteen years ago, this had been a devastated landscape, more akin to Nevada than to the Poconos. Lately, this view has been softened considerably by the return of vegetation. But how had this desolation been caused?  I had known that there had been some mining companies in this area that were somehow responsible for the devastation. Breaking out of the tendency to follow confirmation bias, the fine art of only looking for ideas that confirm ones already held opinions and actively suppressing other ideas, often requires active measures. Since the weather was perfect for a motorcycle ride on that Sunday afternoon, it seemed like a good day for some activity. I determined that I would ride over Blue Mountain and explore the valley beyond for better information onto what had caused the destruction. My rather nebulous plan was to seek out some talkative native sole at a local café and ask them over a cup of coffee what had happened to the valley.
So, with the glorious sunlight bathing the landscape, I headed north on Kings Highway and up and over the stately Blue Mountain with the Appalachian Trail running along its spine. I arrived in the valley and proceeded east toward the industrial town of Palmerton, PA which sits just north of the point where the Lehigh River bores its stately way through the imposing mountain. This brought me along the base of one of those devastated-looking hillocks with a factory town clinging to its southern flank. I turned up the hill into this little village and rode past row after row of little bungalows, nicely maintained but obviously built with one goal in mind; providing cheap housing for a large group of factory workers. There, standing on the sidewalk absorbed in conversation, were two of the elderly residents of this little town. I pulled to a stop beside them. "Can either of you answer a few questions about what happened in this valley?" I asked. The one gentleman rolled his eyes and said, "I'm out of here!" and walked off toward the rear of his house." The other man said, "Do you have a couple of minutes?"
I assured him that indeed I did, and with that, he directed me to have a seat on his front porch while he ducked inside and returned with an armful of newspaper clippings and a photo album. As the next hour or so would prove, I could not have happened upon a better representative to tell me about the disastrous history of the valley. His name was John Colberta, and he had lived in the valley for 74 years. For 41 of those years, he had worked as a machinist for the New Jersey Zinc Company. This company ran the dual zinc ore smelters that lined the north side of Lehigh River that ran through the valley. Pictures from his photo album documented what the valley looked like back in 1954 when the huge, industrial complex spewed billowing clouds of noxious waste products into the skies. At that time, there were still some trees evident on the northern slopes of the valley that lay just across the Lehigh River from this burgeoning complex. This was when John had started his career in the factory, making tooling fixtures for the smelters. He showed me the roller kilns and the huge vacuum tubes that sucked the Zinc oxide dust from the smelters and deposited it into the bag cars. These cars would then transport this important industrial product to the factories across the country that used it in a plethora of industrial products such as paint, and alloys for copper that turned it into bronze that was used for countless cannon muzzles. He showed me that little doors that would be opened to dump the lead oxide into the mix to create the now-banned leaded paints. He talked about the blood testing that was conducted monthly to check that toxic levels were not affecting the workers. From the looks of his body -- clearly visible since he was not wearing a shirt -- he had come through this exposure unharmed. There was a groove across his right shoulder, but that he said was from a bullet that had managed to pass through his jacket and a bit of his skin, causing what he said was a rather "uncomfortable burning sensation!" He was thankful that God had prevented him from leaning a bit farther around the corner as he was investigating where the shooting was taking place. But otherwise his body, and obviously his mind was not worse for the wear of living in this valley which had been listed on the priority list of the USA superfund sites in 1983. His album contained pictures from 2010 of the final demolition of the plant's extensive buildings and the subsequent covering of the entire site with 10 feet of dirt and meandering walking paths. 

Obviously, my penchant for seeing God's hand in a lot of the coincidences of life, caused me to be astounded by how perfectly my plan for finding that talkative and fair individual who could, with authority and without seeming prejudice, relate the history of the storied valley. He did not seem able to understand my interest in the valley as a means of understanding the politics of today. But for me, it galvanized an understanding in my mind. I had struggled to understand the left's "stupid" stand against industrial progress until I saw and felt first-hand the ravishes that capitalism had had upon this valley. For it was fair to say that is was capitalism and the headlong pursuit for products and industrialization that had given rise to that ugly factory and the denuded hillsides. I could feel the gut-wrenching revulsion to this blatant despoiling of "Mother Earth" by the extraction and conversion of its treasures into our playthings. Such reckless acts of violence against nature must be terminated immediately … at least they must be moved to a remote location where we can't see the pollution. We still would like the products, but we would rather that the extraction processes be done far away from the pastoral hills that we wish to save for our grandchildren. Now China! That would be a great place for this to happen! Give China the scourge of capitalism and let their environment be traumatized. Let their citizens fall plague to the attendant pollution. That would be an acceptable solution to the continued need for these cheap products that leave such nasty environmental footprints.

With that understanding of what the world must look like through the eyes of a dedicated environmentalist, I felt more equipped to understand the reason that the Left, who hold Mother Earth in reverence as their god, could find a booming economy to be such a revolting development. After all, the more people with jobs, the more demand for things and the greater the usage of precious resources. A flat or declining economy saves these treasures for future generations. Suddenly it was possible to understand Obama's gloating, as reported in Reuters on July 14, 2009, that his presidency had presided over 800,000 manufacturing jobs that had gone overseas and were never coming back! Good riddance to these destructive, polluting jobs. Instead, he noted, the kids of the future would need free education to train them in skills that would be needed in computer jobs – jobs that would not send smoke billowing into the atmosphere and toxins spreading into our water tables. And it was in support of these "proper" kind of jobs that my glass installation was working. It was finally clear to me why job-killing regulations and massive expenditure to curb global warming was merited. This was the penance to the god of the environmentalist for the callous use of America's resources. It was thereby fine to spend massive amounts of money to buy first-class tickets on polluting jetliners to attend conferences on curbing pollution.
With this realization in hand, I could fundamentally understand why these elitists do not think their position is "stupid." Anything that saves the earth's resource is good and proper. For this same reason, population control saves resources since abortion saves unwanted mouths from requiring our food. I might not agree, but I can better understand the position after seeing the affront of Palmerton's denuded mountains. And this bridge to understanding seemed to be a better way of addressing the partisan divide than fortifying oneself in one's own little corner and firing broadsides across the cultural chasm. And some of these gut-felt emotions against excessive consumption actually align with my own deeply held desire to avoid waste and to live as efficiently as possible. It is a view that I would refer to as trying to be a good steward of earth's resources. Again, we might not agree on what this looks like in totality. But at least it gives one the basis to disagree respectfully.
Do people do stupid stuff? Given that most people would do anything to avoid embarrassment, it seems that people who are guided by a rational mind would only do stuff that they have been able to justify as non-stupid in some more or less convoluted manner. If the mind is not being rational, as is the case with drugs, alcohol and other physiologically distracted thinking, all bets are off. In that case, stupid is the order of the day. But in the case of rationalized, stupid-looking actions, understanding the justification behind the action seems to be a possible path forward to allowing improved communication.