Everyone knows there is a distinction between “stupid” and “ignorant”. The main difference being “stupid people who mean well” are different than “stupid people”. And we call “stupid people who mean well” “ignorant”.

In my experience, I have come to see one other division of the general category of “stupid”. I see “harmless stupid” as most humor and silly assumptions that do not negatively affect life, even if they do hinder success. One example of this that comes to mind is misattributing cause and effect—not ignorantly—but harmlessly. Like when the regularly scheduled sprinkler system goes off during the outdoor church service and people attribute it to the devil doing devil things. They aren’t ignorant of the situation, they just are stupid.

Different from this kind of stupid is the kind which causes insecurity in life. One easy example of this would be alcoholic parents. They may be great parents most of the time, but the weekly or monthly instances of uncontrollable outbursts or whatever particular scenes unfold (kids trying to wake up passed-out parents etc.) leads to insecurity in life.

With me? Make sense?

Routine, even if for harmlessly stupid reasons, is still secure. “Every Monday after dinner my parents drove exactly the number of miles as the calendar date. I never understood why. Still don’t. But we got ice cream afterwords and it was fun overall.” That’s a bizarre and stupid routine, but it is not problematic.

Put another way, and to get to the point of this post, I value security over intelligence.

Moreover, I do not believe that stupidity is necessarily insecure.

What I am not certain about is if I am actually right. All I know today is that I need security.

My wife hails from one of the most uneducated regions, continents, and countries on the Earth. While dating, I noted many harmlessly stupid comments and observations. (This was/is not too different than any other day, or any other interaction with folks.)

Little anecdotes about “everyone there believes all Americans are rich” were cute to hear and even carried an air of “why would they believe otherwise if the only source was Hollywood films?” intentionally-sympathetic soundness. Couple this with the fact that no educated American wants to admit the reality that, “What you just said is completely without thought at a level that is beyond ignorance and evidences some mixture of mental laziness and legitimate inability to think”—especially if the conversant is BIPOC.

To be clear—I have witnessed first-hand many, many American friends hear my wife tell the same anecdotes and they all respond the same way, ie, no one calls out what each of us plainly hears. And why not?

I cannot answer for anyone but myself, and my no-call was because I believed there was harmless stupidity.

But the other kind, the stupidity which leads to insecurity, that is now something I am dealing with every day. And I don’t know how to right the ship. I don’t know how to course correct.

Readers might offer advice about the big things, like kindness, compassion, empathy. And I wanted to believe those exist, but have slowly been convinced that those are culturally-based postures and so the problem in this culture-clash-called-my-family is not resolved.

So far, my solution has been to try “let’s start with truth” and go from there. “Could we agree to say true things?” But the language barrier is such that even this seemingly simple request relies tremendously on ignoring reality and relying on hopeful intentions.

He said: “What did you buy?”

She said: “Groceries.”

So far so good.

He said: “What is this item?”

She said: “Oh, underwear.”

Setback.

He said: “In your culture is ‘underwear’ in the same category as ‘food and soap’ and other things that we use up?”

She said: “It’s wrong to buy underwear now?!!”

So even something as supposedly universal as “truth” seems out of reach.

Of course, the easy solution is to resign. To simply not care. To “let go and let God”. To choose a “non-fighting” version of “peace” as the higher ground in every moment of every day. But the problem with that is I tell the truth. I don’t tell it in a “I’m just keeping it one hundred” provocateur kinda way (mostly not at least). I just need my words to mean things, and I need my kids to mean the same things when they say the same words.

In other words, I need security.