Dummies: For Dummies

            Reason is the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways. This concept, since Aristotle's time, seems to have been completely erased from the mind of the ordinary, everyday citizen. It might be seen on the way to work in the morning, as the driver of the car in front of you swerves into the oncoming traffic lane, for a brief moment, because he was busy changing CDs. Or it might be the woman behind you in a supermarket checkout line, discretely sliding a candy-bar into her purse. Examples can be seen everywhere you look. Stupidity is incessant and inescapable.
             During a regular school day, I might come across a hundred people doing something completely irrational, and all this starts before my day does. I usually wake up in the morning and turn on my computer screen only to close the messenger windows of people I don't know, offering me "favors" of different sorts. These people cannot be serious, can they? I can't understand how any rational person could even contemplate such a thing.
             After a shower and saying goodbye to my parents, I get in the car. This is where it gets really hairy. What should be a ten-minute drive usually turns into a forty-five minute drive. Of course, there are always a couple of people who never learned where the turn signal switch is. I sometimes wonder if I am supposed to read their minds. Reason tells me that I might get rear-ended if someone doesn't know that I"m about to turn, so I use my turn signal.
             You can also tell how many people never look to see how fast they"re going. When an old, decrepit Chevy truck has its turn signal on for over a mile, you could infer that the driver chooses to ignore the oversized, clicking and flashing light that informs you that your turn signal is on. Therefore, they must never look at their instruments. Do they think I can guess when they are really ready to turn? And the survey says, "Irrational".