"Beam me up, Scotty!"

Sometimes I wonder if the best way to protect ourselves from the intelligence deficit that seems to be sweeping the land is to avoid all contact with the outside world.

Take the anti-vaccination movement, which consists of ill-informed parents who foolishly risk the health of children — their own and others — in the misguided belief that vaccines are dangerous. Studies repeatedly have found that vaccines are safe, but that doesn't deter the skeptics. As James Cherry, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The New York Times recently, "There are some pretty dumb people out there.”

And then there are the unheralded cases of rampant stupidity that all of us encounter in our day-to-day travels. These do not involve any kind of organized movement, nor do they make the news.

I'm talking about random acts of incredibly poor judgment that never grab headlines because they are isolated and seemingly inconsequential. When taken together, though, they remind us that there are many people out there who are more than a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

A cashier at the supermarket told me recently that a man had walked up to her counter the previous day carrying a bottle of Gatorade. That was it. He stopped at the market on the way to his destination to wander the aisles, possibly interact with other customers, grab a sports drink and saunter over to the checkout.

“I hope I don’t barf all over everything,” he said as he prepared to pay for his purchase. “I’m on my way to the emergency room.”