The young mom said, “I’m really scared.”

She should be.

Her family denied Covid for months, refusing to get a vaccine. Then her husband caught the virus.

He’s spent the last month on a ventilator.

The doctors now give him a 50 percent chance to live. If he doesn’t make it, he’ll leave behind three kids. If he does make it, then he’ll limp out of the hospital with soul-crushing debt and a prolonged recovery that drives his family into poverty. All this, because he didn’t listen. He’d never been sick before, so he thought doctors were paranoid.

Videos like this are going viral in Stupid America, where people are finally realizing the importance of vaccines — as usual, after it’s too late. Sympathy for this guy wanes a little when you realize something. Not only did he get sick, he also very likely infected his family — not to mention his friends and coworkers. See, it’s one thing to be stupid and get yourself killed. It’s something else to get other people killed. That’s where a little phrase called manslaughter comes into play.

Actions have consequences, and not just for ourselves. It’s something that America has grappled with over the last year.

Anthony Fauci says we’re starting to see the emergence of two Americas, one that gets to resume normal life, and one that sinks into a well of death, tinged with fear and misplaced rage. He’s partly right. These two Americas happen to sit atop historic political rifts. You know, over things like whether or not white guys should get to own black people, whether black people deserve equal schools, and whether women should be allowed to vote, or decide what happens in their own bodies.

In other words, there’s a smart America and a Stupid one.

Unfortunately, I live in the Stupid one.

The Stupid America has never done the right thing on its own. I would know. I’ve learned our history. You should give it a read. Every single time, we have to be forced to do the right thing, the smart thing. The Smart America has to pass laws and send out the national guard to enforce them. We kick. We scream. Eventually we shut up. Then we find some new way to be Stupid, and the process starts all over again.

Here’s what it’s like…

Stupid is out to get you.

A lot of people don’t understand what it’s like to live in a truly stupid region of America. Sure, you can talk about how “stupid” the average person here is in a general sense. I’m not talking about that kind of stupid.

I’m talking about Forrest Grump with an AR-15.

Yep, that kinda stupid. Still confused? Watch Burning Mississippi. Things really haven’t changed much.

Drop that down a few notches, and you get the average resident of my hometown. It’s scary stuff. We boast a literacy rate somewhere around the 80th percentile. We’re not talking about finishing articles in The HuffPost. We’re talking basic reading and writing.

It’s all fun and games when your whacky neighbor talks about conspiracy theories and miracle cures. Sure, you laugh them off.

They’re harmless, right?

Not where I live.

Lemme tell you about the lethality of stupid.

My state went for Trump in 2020. It wasn’t even close. They cheered on the January 6 insurgents. A lot of them came from my state. Mayors and sheriffs here threaten to hang liberals. We don’t put campaign signs in our yard, or on our cars, because we know we’ll get vandalized. Bible thumpers come to our campus every month. They call the faculty whores and devil worshipers to our faces. The police stand guard over them, protecting their freedom of speech. We have the lowest vaccination rates in the entire country. We’ve got young anti-vaxxers dying left and right. Health experts have started calling my hometown ground zero for the next deadly variant.

We don’t enjoy the luxury of waiting around for the news to tell us what’s happening, or what to be worried about next.

If we aren’t careful, we’ll be the news.

That’s life in Stupid America.

Stupid isn’t the same as uninformed.

Soft liberals like to tell me I’m being too hard on the idiots. We need to be nicer to them. We need to have civil discourse. We need to respect their views. Maybe if we show them some compassion, they’ll listen to us.

No, look at history. The only way to end segregation in Stupid America was to pass laws and send troops to enforce them. We didn’t give up slavery until half our cities burned down. Out here in Stupid America, black people weren’t allowed outside after dark. It was a whole thing. They were called sundown towns. Do you think Stupid America’s going to change its mind over a polite chat and a cup of coffee?

About anything???

Nope.

It’s not like I look for fights with them, anyway. I’m not about to start an argument with a card-carrying member of Stupid America. That’s how you get shot. They don’t care who you are, not lately.

In pre-Covid times, I was all about civil discourse and polite discussion. Even then, it didn’t work. See, there’s a difference between uninformed and plain stupid. Being uninformed or uneducated is often beyond someone’s control, especially out here. We’re in the bottom ten of everything. Education. Healthcare. Economy. You name it.

Some people drink knowledge when it’s presented to them. Others proudly reject it. They’ll die of thirst. They treat information like poison. They take the story of Adam and Eve literally. Eating from the tree of knowledge didn’t turn out so well for them, after all.

So, that’s Stupid.

Capital S.

It’s loud. It’s aggressive. It’s violent. It’s not interested in hearing alternate viewpoints, even if it says so.

The soft, gentile liberals hailing from the coast and suburbs never interact with the brand of stupid I encounter on a daily basis. You can’t talk to stupid. You can’t reason with it. Sometimes, you just have to get out of its way and protect yourself the best you can.

Stupid doesn’t care about your rights.

You should see some of the laws my state passes. They’ve banned discussion of race in public schools. They’ve passed laws against transgender people. They’ve been trying to ban abortion for decades. The new supreme court has them all fired up again.

They just recently banned mask mandates.

That means I can’t even require my own, largely unvaccinated students to wear one this fall. I’ll be relying solely on the waning power of my vaccine to protect my unvaccinated daughter. The Pfizer vaccine is just over 60 percent effective at preventing infection, but I suspect it’s not designed for spending several hours a day breathing in the Covid-laden air in a classroom that sees a hundred different bodies a day. Call me paranoid, but I think my chances of catching a significant case are kinda high.

This is how life plays out when you live in Stupid America.

Stupid America doesn’t care about you.

Stupid America watches NewsMax and gets worked up over kneeling football players. They care about their rights, to the exclusion of everyone else’s. Do you wanna talk about your rights not to get sick and die? How about your rights not to get shot by an anti-masker?

Sorry, those rights don’t matter.

Liberal snowflakes have no freedoms in Stupid America.

None.

It’s time to cancel stupid.

You can’t make peace with Stupid America. If you try to talk to them about things like evolution, they get up and leave. Showing them compassion and understanding doesn’t work either, because they accept nothing less than complete submission to their worldview.

You can’t just challenge stupid to a fight in the parking lot, either. Stupid enjoys the advantage of strength.

Stupid has nothing to lose.

We should be outlawing stupidity, but that’s a hard sell to a country that lets Americans blow each other up every July.

The only real way to beat stupid is indirectly. Call it out when you see it. Explain what a severe threat it poses to everyone. Spread facts and opinions to counter it. Be kind to people who aren’t stupid, but merely uninformed or uneducated. Give them a choice between knowledge and ignorance. If they choose ignorance, then leave them alone. Don’t coddle them. Don’t treat them like their fact-free science is equal. It’s not. Besides, stupid doesn’t believe in equality, only its own superiority.

I’ve lived under the tyranny of stupid for most of my life.

It’s not civil, or peaceful.

It’s dangerous.