Everybody Just Shut Up

On a quick trip to the supermarket this morning I parked alongside a beat-up sedan that had about 50 bumper stickers covering its various dings and dents. The biggest and boldest one caught my eye: LePage Is A Moron. For those of you who don't live around here, Paul LePage is Maine's governor. Like him or not, I doubted that he could actually be a moron, defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as "a person affected by mild mental retardation."

It's hard to believe that a mentally retarded person, mild or otherwise, could have successfully obtained  an undergraduate Bachelor of Science Degree, then a Master's in Business Administration specializing in finance and accounting, then run his own consulting firm until becoming the general manager of a Maine-based discount store chain, then serve two terms as city councilor in Waterville, Maine before becoming that city's Mayor and serving eight years, until deciding to run for the governorship and getting elected, twice.

I was thinking about all that in the store as I shopped for the few items I needed. As I headed back to my car, the owner of the moron bumper sticker was also returning to his car. He was about 45 years old, sloppily dressed in baggy jeans, a Red Sox sweatshirt and rubber flip-flops, maybe 75 pounds overweight, and chomping on a huge glazed doughnut which he washed down with a swig from a bottle of green-colored Gatorade. As we both reached our cars at the same time, I asked him, "Not a fan of LePage, I see?"

"Nah, he's a moron," he replied. I almost said, "takes one to know one," but didn't. Instead I drove off, more worried than usual about the future of our country.