How Stupid Are We, Really?

Or is it lazy? Please see Michael Bywater's excellent _Big Babies, or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?_ for a sobering exegesis on media and government infantilization of We the People. For a less-well-written rant, however, I offer up my enduring nausea at a long-running commercial for an osteoporosis medication, starring the presumably brittle-boned Sally Field.

This advertisement haunts me when I see people dawdling in the fruit section of the supermarket, when I zip past cars barely going the speed limit, and each and every time I approach getting more than six hours of sleep. Why? Not because of its insipidity and absurd premise, but because, as Ms. Fields makes clear in her first-person my-story closeup, we are very, very busy people these days, and it wasn't until she had a sit-down with a 'girlfriend' about time-management and its relation to this enfeebling condition that this woman was able to reclaim those seven seconds per day (calculation mine and approximate) she had previously needed to devote not only to ingesting a pill, but to swallowing the liquid necessary to washing it down.

As Field laments, her 'girlfriend,' like so many others, had to 'set aside time' every day (stress hers, not mine) to engage in this laborious - and manifestly wasteful - activity. Now, with this new monthly medication, her lucky friend can use those spare two hundred or so seconds she accrued for other activities, for which, one hopes, she does not have to 'set aside time.' Perhaps drinking a whole glass of liquid. Perhaps bemoaning (briefly) her misspent youth. Perhaps rubbing in a skin cream on one-half of her face, or filing one nail, or ironing one cuff.

How stupid? I don't know. I can't imagine anyone for whom this ad would make sense. Of course anyone would rather take a pill once a month over once a day, and once a day over seven times a day -- but 'set aside time?' The imagination is beggared to imagine that taking a pill cannot reasonably, in most people's thinking, be combined with, for example, spontaneous, or at least natural and necessary, consumption of liquid. One could even be reading, or on the telephone, or contemplating one's misspent youth -- and neither the taking of the pill, nor the swallowing of the liquid, would interrupt any of these.

Unless I am wrong.