Being as I had spent many years in Public Safety, the Darwin Awards hold a special place in my heart…
Insensitive?? Yes, they are. Amusing? very much so. Why? I don’t know, maybe it’s my sense of humor. Stupidity, especially rank stupidity like that is something I have always been amazed by. I mean, everyone of us has done something that was less than brilliant. But, come on, tying ropes to railroad rails? Trying to stop a bus by pushing back on it? As talk show host Roe Conn likes to say: “Stupid people die in stupid ways, thereby cleansing the gene pool.” There are brainless things, dumb things, and then, there is that special kind of stupidity that results in a needless tragedy.
And that’s what all of those were, needless tragedies, that were the results of their own actions, because they didn’t take a second to stop and think. It’s amazing to me. If all of those people had taken an extra second to think about what they should have been doing, they would be here today.
In some respects the honorable mentions are funnier than the actual Darwin Awards because there is no death involved.
But remember that most railroad related deaths wouldn’t meet the Darwin Award criteria of creativeness - the average trying to beat the train to the grade crossing is just too common of stupidity. But trying to tie a shopping cart to a train - that is different (wonder if the guy said “hey guys, watch this”). And the collison of two cars trying to beat a train - well, that is a new twist which raises common stupidity (trying to beat a train) to Darwinian levels. Plus, the Darwin Awards website disqualifies people who endanger others. Reading those things, it never amazes me what some people will do.
To be a true Darwin Award recipeint, you must die BEFORE you have off spring. If your kids survive you then you still beat the Darwin Award no matter how dumb or funny you death was realy.