Free Capital Punishment Essays: Mandatory Death Penalty for Nitwits :: Argumentative Persuasive Topics

Mandatory Death Penalty for Nitwits    When I was in high school, my friend Mike and I earned extra money working after school and on weekends at a drugstore located at the north end of our town. Before we started working in the retail business, we both had a fairly high opinion of humanity. That is to say, we thought that the average person wouldn't try to cheat us, would be at least marginally polite, and would be smart enough to avoid walking in front of a bus.    As it turned out, we were wrong.    When we stepped behind the counter of that drugstore, we had to remove the rose-colored glasses and reexamine our cherished ideas about humanity. We found that there were many, many rude people out there and that quite a few would cheat us if they were given half a chance. We also found the average person was much less intelligent than we had thought. On Labor Day, 1995, I started a list of all the irritating and stupid things that people did while we were at work. After a while, other employees began to contribute to the list, although I compiled about 75% of the complaints. By the time I left at the end of May 1996, the list had 567 items on it, and we were referring to some of the customers by number.    In particular, I remember 337, an older lady who came in early every Saturday morning to buy a candy bar. Sadly, 337 never had the requisite fifty cents, and as she was rummaging through her purse looking for spare change (which sometimes took as long as ten minutes), impatient customers would line up behind her. Finally, she would storm off in a huff.    Incredibly, 337 would return several times over the course of the day and attempt to purchase the candy bar again. Once more would come the agonizing search through her purse, but (surprisingly enough) the change at the bottom had not bred over the course of the day, and over and over she was forced to leave in defeat and shame.    Number 337 was hardly unique, or even unusual. Every shift that I worked, I was forced to deal with people nearly as clueless as she was. Mike and I were inevitably led to the conclusion that stupidity should be painful; we thought that if stupidity were painful, people would go to great lengths to educate themselves.