Please just quit

We had a woman like that in our Visual Communications course. She was under the misguided notion that because she was old as ass, she was also wise by default. She didn't know her snatch from her elbow regarding anything in any class, yet she treated the lecturers as if she was their superior based on some sort of age related measure. She argued everything, like a drunk child I might add, and everytime she was subsequently drowned in a vat of her own wrongness, she took it as some kind of personal slight exacted upon her by people who merely failed to understand the subject according to her.

She used to turn around and use her miserable results, seriously relaxed grasp of any of the course work and the correction that generated, and use it as evidence of some kind of mythical agist conspiracy. I speculate that prior to joining our course, she spent most of her time around children and equally stupid and ill-educated peers, where she was free to spew all manner of bowelbrained opinion without ever being confronted by somebody who actually had the intellect or perhaps the will to set her straight. Suddenly landing in a class full of students and lecturers half her age who had no problem taking her down to intellectual China town obviously proved to be a shock to the system.

I see it with my own mother. She left school at 17 and surrounds herself with other woman who've done the same. They all married wealthy husbands when they hit their early twenties, then just sat back and let their intelligence dwindle to dangerous levels, just wallowing in ignorance. They are like a support group for ridiculous opinion and ignorance fuelled craziness. They rarely correct each other's idiotic notions, I suspect because in their world of small talk and social events, contradicting each other could upset the precious equilibrium generated by everybody nodding and agreeing.

My old man, who's a medical Doctor, is just too weary to bother arguing with any of them; he craves two things in life, peace and quiet, and arguing with a foolish wife and her foolish friends is not a surefire way of ensuring either. I see this in her friends' husbands too, a collection of well educated men who just couldn't be bothered dealing with the emotional Chernobyl that resuilts from arguing reason with unreasonable people.The end result for my mother is this: she thinks she's right about everything, but seldom is, however in her little bubble world of children and silly undereducated housewives, she is also seldom corrected.

After enough years of this conditioning, to be suddenly confronted with intelligent argument and contradiction, it must seem to them like they've stumbled accross the most ill-informed bunch of crazy no-nothings they could have ever imagined. They rationalize this to themselves by deciding that everybody in this new environment is crazy, stupid or weird, then they run back to their bubbles after college hours so they can enjoy the fruits of equally dumb people patting them on the back and agreeing with them that those lecturers and students do sound stupid.

Many members of these kinds of anti-intellectual support groups will be of the ilk that reasure themselves regarding their own educational defecit by saying things like 'You don't learn shit in no University anyhow', which is usually met with a reaction which ranges between solemn nods of agreement and full blown high fiving..
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I am the people my mother warned me about.