A modest proposal: Is it time to bring back the Darwin Awards?

If you set aside the politics, picking up a flashbang grenade in attempt to throw it at law enforcement officers, begging them to shoot you, driving cars into them, and putting your hands on them while packing heat are decidedly not smart things to to do.

Let me start by saying in no uncertain terms that very few people in this world deserve to die, but as Clint Eastwood’s William Munny infamously growled at the conclusion of the classic anti-western, Unforgiven, deserve frequently has nothing to do with it.  Whether knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, rightly or wrongly, people have at times a nasty, self destructive habit of putting themselves in situations that can lead to their own deaths at worst, serious injuries at best.  Generally speaking, most people will approach a potential situation with an instinctual assessment of the risk of bodily harm, attempting to discern the likelihood of getting hurt or killed should they proceed.  While the details of this process will be unique to each individual and the results are not necessarily perfect, a majority will avoid obviously high risk situations such as throwing themselves into the middle of a barroom brawl, chasing after someone who cut them off on the highway at high speed, standing on their tip toes at the top of a ladder, sticking their hand in a lawnmower or blender, picking up a lit firework, and yes, intentionally taunting men or women with weapons.  Under normal circumstances, unless the life of a loved one is at stake or something equally compelling like trying to save your comrade in the middle of an actual war, the average person will avoid these and other situations for what most would consider obvious reasons.  Though it is not fair to say that those who do not avoid situations like this deserve to die, it is reasonable to wonder what compelled themselves to take on the risk in the first place and to urge others not to take the same risk, lest they also end up dead.

From 1992 to 2022, the Darwin Awards was dedicated to “honoring” those who failed this risk-reward test.  As their website put it, “The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it in a spectacular manner!”  The Awards were said to be “In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution,” to “commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.”  At the time, there were five criteria by which these “awards” were judged.  Reproduction, which meant that the “winner” was “Out of the gene pool: dead or sterile,” self-selection, causing one’s own demise, excellence, a “Sublimely idiotic misapplication of judgment,” maturity, that is being old enough or mentally fit enough to be capable of sound judgment in the first place, and veracity, the incident leading to the death had to be true.  Most of the criteria were self-explanatory, but self-selection deserves a little more detail for our purposes because it doesn’t necessarily mean the potential winner did it to themselves without anyone else’s involvement.  Instead, it’s defined as “The candidate’s own gross ineptitude must be the cause of the incident that earns him the nomination. A hapless bystander done in by a heavy anvil dropped from a skyscraper is merely suffering from bad luck. If you are smashed by the anvil that you rigged above your own balcony to kill those squawking pigeons, then you are a Darwin Awards contender.  A tourist trampled to death by a rampaging bull in a parking lot is experiencing bad luck. If you are gored to death during the ‘Running of the Bulls’ while riding naked in a shopping cart piloted by your drunken friend, you are a candidate for a Darwin Award.”  The most recent winner, a Russian soldier in Ukraine, provides a helpful example.  The individual in question was issued body armor by the army, but he apparently spotted a Macbook he wanted to steal, and so he removed his chest plate and replaced it with the laptop, only to be shot dead through the chest.  As they described it, “You are wearing body armor in a warzone. You spot abandoned Macbook. You want Macbook. Where to hide it? With quick reflexes a Russian soldier slid that Macbook into his chest armor pocket, replacing a ballistic plate designed to save his life.”

While much of the attention over the recent shootings, killings, and associated injuries in Minneapolis has focused on the actions of the ICE and Border Patrol agents involved, very little has been paid to the actions of the victims prior to the events.  Namely, were they behaving in a manner that most prudent people would or were they acting either recklessly, carelessly, stupidly or some combination of the three prior to being injured or killed?  In other words, as crass as it sounds, do we have some potential candidates for the Darwin Awards here or are we dealing with actions most would consider relatively low risk?  Sadly, to me at least the answer in some cases is an obvious yes.  Over the weekend, a female anti-immigration protester was seriously injured after she picked up an active flashbang grenade, ran towards agents nearby, and attempted to throw it at them.  Perhaps needless to say, the grenade went off in her hand, costing her at least a finger.  In another video, a man is marching down a smoke filled Minneapolis street that appears more suited to a Mad Max film or something out of the Amazon hit Fallout than modern America.  He is big, burly, wearing a black leather mask and giving the middle finger to individuals offscreen on both the right and the left, as though he owns the place and has not a care in the world.  A couple of seconds later, however, agents approach him from behind, at which point he starts running and screaming “get the fuck off me” before ending up face down in the street and handcuffed.  In yet another, a man stands confidently before a group of agents, taunting them by screaming “Shoot me, shoot me mother fucker, shoot, shoot!” But when the agents take him down with a simple paintball, he starts moaning and whining in pain, yelling “aah shit.”  Similarly, a man taunting ICE officers outside a hotel, claims “I’m not scared of your pussy ass,” until he gets shot in the stomach with a beanbag and doubles over in pain.

Thankfully none of them died, but clearly we’re dealing with folks who score unfortunately high on The Darwin Award criteria.  While the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are necessarily more politically charged and therefore harder to judge, if you strip away the controversy surrounding President Trump’s mass deportation policy, there is a similar, if more tragic pattern of both doing things prudent people simply don’t do.  Ms. Good and her partner were not simply walking down the street when agents accosted them.  Instead, they were accosting and taunting the agents, as in a group of four to five men, all armed with guns, men her political allies regularly describe as poorly trained thugs with itchy trigger fingers.  Ms. Good then gets in her car despite one of the agents being at her door and asking her to exit in no uncertain, some may even say rough language.  Rather than reply to defuse the situation, the partner bizarrely and recklessly yells, “drive baby drive,” so she backs up, then accelerates forward, directly at an agent before turning the wheel.  By most standards, had this taken place outside an ongoing political controversy, almost everyone would agree these actions weren’t exactly smart.  Similarly, Alex Pretti was said to be just an observer, on the street that fateful day simply directing traffic, but tragically, he did more than that.  Prior to him being swarmed by agents and ultimately killed, he inserts himself into an altercation between one of the agents and a woman on the street.  While we do not know what led to that altercation, after an agent shoved the woman off of the street, Mr. Pretti approached the same agent from behind and put his hands on him.  It’s this incident that led to him being thrown on the ground, and bizarrely even after that happened, he doesn’t disclose that he is armed.  Further, CNN reported yesterday that this wasn’t his first run in with ICE or the Border Patrol.  A week earlier, he observed ICE chasing someone, hopped out of his car, and began chasing them down the street, blowing his whistle.  ICE apparently tackled him that time, it’s said he was treated for a broken rib, but they released him without charge.  In other words, Mr. Pretti got into an altercation with ICE for inserting himself where he had no legal right to intervene and was injured, but he didn’t stop there.  He went out again and inserted himself into another situation where he had no legal right to be there either, this time armed with a loaded weapon, and ended up dead.  I ask again, setting aside the politics, would a reasonable person describe these actions as smart or would they consider them reckless, something smart people do no do?

Of course, to some or perhaps even many on the left the actions of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti were heroic.  They were willing to sacrifice themselves, putting their own bodies on the line to save others, which would make them “warriors” as one of Ms. Good friends described her and would transform a lack of prudence into courage.  In a war, everything is on the line.  You do what must be done to protect your comrades and prevail.  While those who believe this are certainly entitled to their opinion, the idea that there is a war happening on the streets of Minneapolis barely works as a metaphor, much less actual armed combat between opposing armies to settle some territorial, economic, or other dispute.  Whatever you may personally believe, neither were soldiers in an army of any kind and if they were, they would have been soldiers in an insurgent one, a confederate force operating against the lawfully elected leaders of the country.  We used to say that was bad, especially for an issue that has long been considered well within the domain of our democratic processes.  Up until President Donald Trump returned to office, everyone agreed that immigration policy was the province of the federal government and disputes over it were best left to the courts and the ballot box.  How do we know this?  For one, conservatives were aghast at President Biden’s generally open borders approach, but no one – and I mean no one – seriously suggested that average citizens mass at the border to prevent migrants from passing through on their own, and should some have done so only to end up dead, I assure you progressives would be laughing at their stupidity, nominating them for Darwin Awards of their own, not calling them heroes.  Second, the one time a state attempted to implement its own immigration policy, when Texas began Operation Lone Star, it was immediately decried by progressives as an abuse of power, an usurpation of the federal government.  Governor Greg Abbott was not cheered as a hero of the resistance.  He was sued and ordered to halt the operations.  If he didn’t comply and instead stood on resistance grounds and someone ended up getting hurt, does anyone honestly believe he would have been feted as a hero for his efforts? Third, the current Trump Administration has already been taken to court over immigration, many times, and at times has lost.

Since this is the way immigration has always been dealt with and was indeed being dealt with right now, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t continue to be dealt with in the same fashion.  The difference is President Trump and their hatred of him, but that doesn’t make them heroes or those urging them on members of some ill defined resistance.  Instead, it makes them prone to reckless, suicidally stupid behavior while the armchair warriors egg them on from the safety of their computer screens.  In an ideal world, those pushing this would be the winners of their own special Darwin Awards, but they are happier on their keyboards than actually behaving recklessly on their own, I would argue for obvious reasons. To be certain, some (many?) may believe comparing these injuries and deaths to the Darwin Awards is either crass as I mentioned earlier, distasteful, disrespectful, insensitive, or some combination of them all, but that’s kind of the point.  The reason this is a modest proposal is to illustrate the absurdity of ordinary citizens picking up grenades or putting their hands on law enforcement while carrying a weapon, things most people simply do not do. In my mind at least, there is no doubt that Ms. Good and Ms. Pretti would be alive today and the others would not be injured if they didn’t behave recklessly enough to at least earn a nomination.  Everyone knows this in principle, and yet they fail to clearly say it for political reasons.  Instead, they claim they’re heroes, dead and injured ones, in an imaginary war, but they would not be saying this if the politics were reversed or there were no politics at all in play.  If an armed man put his hands on a police officer and ended up dying because of it for no reason, almost everyone would claim that he might not have deserved to die, but that his own actions led to his death even if the officer acted improperly.  If you are remotely interested in preventing anyone else from getting killed, you would be telling them not to do as they have done.  You would not be telling them that they were on a mission in the Battle of Minneapolis, the next Gettysburg.  I’m reminded of the Phish fan favorite, “The Lizards,” where “the Lizards were a race of people practically extinct From doing things smart people don’t do,” and I believe that in almost any other circumstances, the general call would be for caution and restraint, not more reckless and dangerous behavior that might require bringing back The Darwin Awards.  Sadly, however, President Trump is involved and sanity rarely prevails.