Sometimes I really think stupid people have it made. It would be so much easier to believe that people are bad just because they have dark skin, or funny-shaped eyes. Or that they're bad because they go to a synagogue instead of a church. Or that they're bad because they don't go to church at all.

I really wish I could believe that hanging a teacher's pet outside their window would actually cause them to change my grade. Or because I'm good at athletics I don't have to learn a thing and can beat a kid to death just because he likes guys and not girls. Or because I drive a fancy car and live in a fancy house that makes me better than the kid who has neither. Or if I make a lot of money the rest of the world can go fuck itself while I and my friends barbeque on the porch of my yacht.

It would be so much nicer to think because I live in a crappy neighborhood and have dark skin fathering seven kids with six women makes me more of a man, or because I carry a big gun and a lot of drugs I can shoot at policemen. Or since my boyfriend will leave me if I insist he wear a condom I should just forget about it and have some fun.

It would be so much simpler if I could believe that since I watched grinding poverty go in and out of my store every single day for years that it was the color of the skin that made the idiot. That I could quit school at 14 and hang with my buds and lift my fist in the air when I heard a great man try to speak for me and say "content of their character", and then pull an AK-47 out and shoot at a kid walking down the street because he's wearing blue instead of red, and still be a part of that man's vision. That just because someone has light colored skin when they remark on these facts they are a racist.

I just wish I could believe in my heart that Jihad means strapping bombs to my child and sending them to kill other children. That only through slowly strangling a people by driving tanks down their streets I will be safer. That only by flying this airplane into that building I can lift the oppression of a people.

It would be much more comforting if I could teach my kids it was the Jews who killed Jesus and black people are black because it's the mark of Cain and we can do whatever we want to them because of it. I only wish I could believe the only reason Africa is in such a mess is because there aren't any white people in charge any more. That this is a white, Christian nation threatened on all sides by immigrants and liberals and blacks and Jews, and Jesus knew it was OK to try to kill these people if you had to, even if he didn't actually say it.

I only wish I could say "nigger" casually in conversation, any conversation, even if it were just me and one other person. I only wish I thought "nigger" was OK to say because I am black. Or because Hispanics like to gather on street corners and talk with each other it makes them dirty and dangerous and if only we could send them all back to wherever they came from life would be better.

But I can't say those things. I can't believe them. I can't. Once you've held a dozen human skulls in your hand and only noticed how much they look alike, it's impossible. Once you learn that you can definitively tell a woman from a man, or a grownup from a child, just by looking at the bones because those are real. physical. differences. but can only make a provisional, educated guess about race, forget religious belief, because those are made up, it's impossible. Once you understand that there isn't any biological test on the planet that can definitively tell the race or religion of one completely healthy human being from another completely healthy human being, it's impossible to believe any of these things.

Because believing these things, believing any single one of these things is just stupid. And yet I know that we all have the same brains. I know it. We are all, under the skin, very, very much alike. There is genius in all of us, a god in every soul.

And yet the world is filled with people that hold ridiculous beliefs. Stupid, crazy, ignorant, here-please-wear-this-stupid-sign-around-your-neck-so-I-know-not-to-bother-talking-with-you idiotic beliefs. What I want to know is, given the incontrovertible fact that we all have the same size and functional brains in our skulls, how come there are so many people who are so goddamned stupid?

Philosophers all over the world throughout history have pondered why, if there is a benevolent god, evil exists. My question is why, if we all have the same brain between our ears, stupid people exist.

Because, as far as I'm concerned, if you eliminated all the stupid people evil would just take care of itself.