Idiot of the Week, Sherri Shepard, Care of the View

You know, I'm actually one of those guys that doesn't hate The View. I've watched it a few times, and while it certainly isn't my favorite talk show, it's not in its own special category of inane. It's The Man Show with breasts. No biggie.

But for crying out loud, just when I thought I had heard the dumbest thing ever on TV, here comes Sherri Shepard with the worst ever. First she tells us she doesn't believe in evolution. That's bad enough, although in a lot of ways that can be blamed on others: a poor education system, and lying anti-science ministers top the list. However, there is no excuse short of sheer idiocy for her next claim: that she doesn't know or care if the earth is flat, as Whoopi Goldberg found out when she asked her.

"I never thought about it Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it? But I'll tell you what I thought about: how I'm going to feed my child, how I'm going to take care of my family. 'Is the world flat?' has never entered into...that has never been an important thing to me."

I kept waiting for her to say she's "keeping it real!", which is another way of saying "I assume anything I don't understand isn't important". I mean really, where does one start with this? Yes it's wonderful that Sherri only wants to worry about how to feed her child. And sure, if that's all she's capable of intellectually, then she should no more be made fun of for her perspicacity than a paraplegic should be made fun of for his foot speed. Her tone, however, and the tone of the millions of other people who have answered similar questions similarly, is not one of "pity me I'm not up to snuff", but rather "It's beneath me to worry about such things and you shouldn't either".

These are the same people that say things like "college doesn't make you smarter" (yeah, sorry, it does), and "I don't need to learn algebra, I'll never use it", like they'd have a clue (Edison thought the phonograph would be used for office dictation). I don't mean to go all Atlas Shrugged here, but you people couldn't worry only about feeding your child and taking care of your family as poor Sherri does, if there weren't millions of people out here who bother to worry about everything else so you don't have to. There is a lot going on in the world because most of us understand things like the earth not being flat, and that we evolved, and people like Sherri benefit from that knowledge, whether they understand that or not. Were people like Sherri in charge of human history, we'd all still be sitting in caves wondering if rocks were edible. Planes and computers do not get built, nor vaccines invented, nor moons reached, worrying only about those closest to us. What is assumed by Sherri to be so noble, worrying only about one's family, is actually, when you get right down to it, extremely selfish.

It's also a load of bullshit. She can't know the shape of the earth because she has to spend that effort worrying about her family? I'll bet she knows who won the last American Idol. It's not a lack of time, but a lack of interest, of intellect, and understanding, that led her here. As Barbara Walters pointed out in response to Sherri's false black and white view, "You can do both". Yeah, most of us do.

I'm not asking people like Sherri to be rocket scientists. I'm not even begrudging her her opportunity to make a lot of money at a job one could do not knowing the earth was round and bragging about it. Bully for her, and bully for you if you have a similar situation. But for the love of all the gods, when the subject comes up concerning an understanding of the world on which your cushy little life depends (and trust me, it does), and which is beyond your abilities, and which has been grasped by other people who were willing to put forth the effort to know it, try to have a little humility, and a little gratitude, and just the teensiest appreciation. You have the luxurious, by historical standards, life you have because of the rest of us, alive and in history, who expanded our interests and efforts in the world a little further than our immediate, personal concerns.