How stupid can we get?

We sit here, comfortable in America, air-conditioned or heated as need be, fed and watered and clothed and sheltered.

Really sheltered!  As in the recent case of a young female college freshman who was sitting in class, got a test back from her professor with a C- grade, and texted her mom back home.  Mom got so upset she called the daughter back and demanded that the poor student take the phone down to the front of the lecture hall and give it to the professor so the mother could really give it to the professor.

But we are concerned about other people all around the globe too, and we're the first to pack ships full of food, clothing, drinking water and medicine for people in other, less fortunate parts of the world.

Such as Hollywood, California.

If you can believe it, some sections (the wealthier ones) of Los Angeles show vaccination rates as low as those of South Sudan.

I wouldn't let her treat me for a splinter

South Sudan, a country that just gained its independence three years ago, a landlocked country in Africa so poor that famine and pestilence are everyday parts of life, where over a million people are roaming homeless and more than 400,000 people have fled to neighboring countries...that South Sudan.

Yet their children are getting just as much vaccination as the children of people such as Ione Skye, the actress who was in the movie "Say Anything" a hundred years ago, and who has now decided that her two daughters don't need regular vaccinations, against the advice of doctors and all wisdom,  because "people don't like being told what to do."

This foolishness started in the late 1990's, spread by a doctor from England and by Jenny McCarthy, the noted actress and expert on most everything.  She told everyone who would listen (and many more who wouldn't) that the vaccinations that any normal parents provide for their kids cause autism.

Of course, the causes of autism are still unknown, but since Jenny McCarthy is attractive and reasonably famous (more so than the 4th runner-up on American Idol 2005, less so than Meryl Streep) people took her word as valid and withheld vaccines from their kids.

As a result, cases of measles and whooping cough (pertussis) are on the rise among kids in LA, because parents who prefer the sage advice of crackpots to the words of people who have, you know, been to medical school, are able to have their children avoid inoculation by filling out a Personal Belief Exemption form, thereby being just as smart as Alanis Morissette and Emily Deschanel, two more people who willingly forgo lifesaving and epidemic-preventing medicine that many mothers in civil-war-torn South Sudan and Chad would love to have for their children.

And then people wonder why others shake their heads in disbelief.