“Mama Says,‘Stupid Is As Stupid Does.’” Stinking Thinking!
Farm worker Javier Diaz suffered three cracked ribs and a broken leg and collarbone. His employer, cattle rancher Juan Cadavid told The Wall Street Journal’s online site “The Wall” he was “tossed… in the air as if he were a ball.” Fisherman Alvaro Molina’s boat was hit in the Magdalena River, forcing him to swim to share.
The culprits?
Hippopotamuses. (Or hippopotami, if you prefer.)
Diaz and Molline were lucky. Worldwide, hippos kill around 500 people a year and males weigh from 3,000 to over 9,000 pounds; females tip the scale at about 3,000 pounds.
The attackers were not “normal hippos.” They were Colombian “cocaine hippos,” each consuming at least 110 pounds of plants a day, destroying local vegetation and pooping so much that the extra nutrients they release are causing algae blooms, depleting the oxygen content essential to the survival of fish in ancient rivers, and wreaking havoc on the regional ecosystem.
These hippos can start reproducing really young, calving one or more times a year. “And they can reproduce for a very long time, 50 years, almost to the end of their lifespan,” University of Florida professor of biology Amanda Subalusky told Germany’s international broadcaster DW.com.
Cocaine hippos have no natural predators – Nile crocodiles, lions and spotted hyenas that prey on young hippos. Estimates [Read: “Scientific wild guesses ‘cause no one knows for sure.”] put their number at between 90 and 180 and, without significant interventions, including sterilizations and outright culling, their numbers could reach 1,000 by 2035.
Proposals for flying the mammals to Africa, India, Mexico and Ecuador are being met with worldwide opposition because the cocaine hippos might introduce previously unknown diseases to their new habitats.
Colombia’s hippos are a unique example of the long-term effects of “stinking thinking” and what happens when people don’t ask and think ahead.
Colombia’s hippos?!?!?!?!?
Yup!
Expelled from school as a teenager, Juan Palbo Escobar bounced from smuggling stereo equipment and stealing tombstones for resell to driving coca paste (the building block of cocaine) from Andean farms to laboratories in Medellin. In the mid-1970s he co-founded the Medellin cartel and, over time, amassed a reported $30 billion dollar fortune, which included the Hacienda and its zoological “garden.” At the time of his December 2, 1993 death (by suicide?) in a running gunbattle with police, Escobar was believed responsible for an estimated 4,000 deaths, including 600 police officers, half the Colombian Supreme Court, and the passengers of a downed plan- believed to be carrying a pro-extradition-to-United States presidential candidate.
The murderous Escobar brought the first four hippos – part of a menagerie of zebras, giraffes, camels, kangaroos and rhinoceroses, most of which died in transport - to his Hacienda in the 1980s, telling himself “I want what I want when I want it and I want hippos now.”
Stinking thinking!
Because “brain damage” goes neuronal-group-to-neuronal-group in our heads, when we think about boxing or bungy-jumping, we don’t.
At our ages (and with our knees), we’re not gonna attempt to summit Mount Everest (or Mount Anything) or compete in a triathlon.
We don’t get down on the floor to do yoga or any other exercise, because we’d have to call for Fire Rescue to help us stand up again.
We tend to “think ahead and long-term” and, in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “Mama says, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’”
We try to think ahead and long-term because we’re all supposed to ask ourselves “How will what I want to do affect others, including our families and those we love; our community; God’s gifts of Nature and the Environment; the World we live in: and the Community of God’s People.”
Admittedly, that’s a lot of asking. So, as priest-counselors and/or counselor-priests, we turn to Science. The National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health describes what most of us call “addiction” as:
“a chronic, relapsing disorder characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use despite adverse consequences. It is considered a brain disorder, because it involves functional changes to brain circuits involved in reward, stress, and self- control… Addiction is a lot like other diseases… If left untreated, they can last a lifetime and may lead to death.”
The 2013 5th Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association established two diagnoses. “Substance Use Disorder” encompasses a range of classes of drugs – including alcohol, caffeine, hallucinogens, opioids, sedatives, tobacco, and stimulants – and “Alcohol Use Disorder” focuses solely on alcohol.
Unlike the common cold, addiction isn’t a “catchable” “disease of the brain.” And, despite how often the phrase is used, there’s no “addictive personality.” Rather, with long term and chronic abuse, individuals develop thought and behavior patterns – “I can stop any time I want,” “I only do it on weekends,” “I only drink beer, not hard liquor,” or “I need to get buzzed in order to socialize” – that serve to justify and maintain their misuse.
Men and women in long term recovery often refer to those rationalizations as “stinking thinking” and boil that “thinking’” down to “I want what I want when I want it and I want it NOW!” or “selfish, self-centered and self-serving.” [The phrase “stinking thinking” comes to us from American psychotherapist Albert Ellis and Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy.]
The essence of stinking thinking is “It’s all about me.”
Too often, stinking thinking is just plain stupid. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump and his “Moma,” “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Incredibly rare and formed over millions of years, hoodoos are popularly known as “fairy chimneys,” “tent rocks,” or “earth pyramids.” These jaw-dropping rock formations can range in size from five to one hundred and fifty feet tall and often look like boulders sitting on a kitchen stool.
Found in ancient, arid drainage basins or badlands, they are characterized by their soft sediment-like clay, minimal vegetation and high drainage density. Utah’s Valley State Park is home to some of North America’s most awe-inspiring hoodoos.
In 2014, two Utah men, leaders of a Varsity Scout team for boys ages 14 and 15 sponsored by their Mormon church, became infamous when they decided to push a hoodoo from its perch and laughed about destroying one of Nature’s masterpieces dating to the Jurassic Period.
Because we don’t want to further embarrass their families or their Scout troop, we won’t name them. But the fact that they videoed and YouTube-posted their antics – they are seen laughing and celebrating – belies their claim of concern that the balanced rock might fall and injure Scouts of other park visitors. So much for leadership in conservation and teaching “leave no trace” principles.
They were sentenced to a year of probation and required to pay almost $1,000 in court costs and $1,500 for the cost of the criminal investigation.
Forrest Gump was right “Stupid is as stupid does.” Sinking Thinking is “all about me.”
“Ivan” of Bristol in South West England and his girlfriend “Haley” can teach a graduate course on “The Fine Art of Stinking Thinking.” In June 2023, the two decided it would be a great idea to scratch “Ivan+Hayley 23” on a brick wall of one of the world’s most iconic buildings – Rome’s 2,000-year-old Colosseum. Then, after being filmed by tourists who released the videos to the world’s media – resulting in their arrests after returning to England, Ivan wrote “I admit with profound embarrassment that only after what regretfully happened did I learn of the antiquity of the monument.”
Former Phoenix television news reader Kari Lake lost the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race by more than 17,000 votes. Since then, she’s lost or had her appeals denied in every single court challenge to those results – including the Arizona Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court. When a 2021 presidential ballot audit found no evidence of election fraud, Lake demanded the election be “decertified” – a legal impossibility because such a process doesn’t exist. In October 2023, Lake filed paperwork to run for the U.S. Senate this year – even as she continues to argue that she was actually elected Arizona’s governor in 2022. If (when?) Lake loses the senatorial election in November, she’ll almost certainly claim the election was stolen (and that tens of thousands of illegal aliens and dead people voted against her).
Because… We’ll she’s Kari Lake and it’s all about her. Selfish. Self-seeking. Self-important. And she wants what she wants when she wants it – even if it’s an election she lost by 17,000 votes and she can’t prove otherwise.
It is impossible to find sympathy (perhaps even empathy) for James and Jennifer Crumbley, who were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for failing to secure the handgun they purchased four days before their son use it to kill four of his high school classmates and wound six more students and a faculty member. Days earlier, the younger Crumbley wrote, “I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the… school. I want help but my parents don’t listen to me so I can’t get any help.”
During her separate trial, Jennifer Crumbly admitted spending more than $20,000 in one year on her horses – but ignoring her son’s pleas for mental health care.
Selfish. Self-centered. Self-seeking.
Gypsy, an emaciated and not-fed-for-a-month albino python, had already escaped its glass tank ten times before it slithered free again in 2010, strangled and attempted to devour 18-mont-old Shaianna Hare. Jaren Hare and her live-in boyfriend were both found guilty of aggravated manslaughter and child neglect and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Selfish. Self-centered. Self-seeking.
In his bid for reelection, the 45th president of the United States garnered 74,224,319. He claims he received more votes than any other candidate in American history and he’s right. Only he’s not. In 2016 he received 62,985,106 votes – 45.9% of all votes - and 306 electoral votes. He won the presidency despite the fact that his opponent received 65,853,625 (48%) of votes. He just happened to win the Electoral College vote.
There’s just a few problems with his perpetually repeated and self-serving claims. Yes. He won more votes than anyone had ever received before 2021 – about twelve million more votes. But Joe Biden received 81,284,666 (51.3%) votes and 306 Electoral College votes, while the incumbent only garnered 74,224,319 (46.8%) and 232 Electoral College votes.
More than anyone ever before but not more than Joe Biden in 2020.
Stinking Thinking, born of selfish, self-centered and self-serving and fed on “I want what I want when I want it and I want it now,” is always dangerous and deadly. And its effects can last for generations.
Fidelity to the Gospel demands honesty and the grace of thinking long-term about the consequences of one’s words and actions. The Great Lies of a “stolen election” and “more votes than anyone in history” have consequences:
Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
In the days and months that followed, four police officers committed suicide.
Two “stop the steal” protestors died of cardiovascular disease.
One “STS” rioter was initially believed killed “in a crush of fellow rioters” but actually died of “accidental acute amphetamine intoxication.”
One rioter was killed by a police officer’s bullet as she attempted to lead others breaking into the Speaker’s Lobby of the House Chamber.
By the eve of the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, federal prosecutors had charged more than 1,265 defendants and secured 718 guilty pleas – including 213 who pleaded to assaults on federal officers, obstructing law enforcement, seditious conspiracy and other felonies. Four-hundred-and-sixty had received sentences of incarceration ranging from time serve to twenty-two years.
All because one man and his sycophants refused to accept the numbers that said he lost. Because his motto appears to be “I want what I want when I want it and I want it now. And damned be the consequences.”
Stinking Thinking!