The Darwin Awards are always funny to read about, how some idiot leaned over the edge of a cliff to take a selfie and fell to their doom, or forgot to put the safety catch on while cleaning their gun and shot themselves in the head. But this year’s ceremony will feature something a little different.
This year an award will be presented to an entire country. Specifically the UK will be receiving a Darwin Award for Brexit.
Awards chairman Stu Pidkunz had this to say on the matter:
“We couldn’t overlook the stupidity of an entire nation democratically voting to deprive itself of all its human rights for possibly generations to come. We thought about making 17.4 million individual awards but that wouldn’t work as voting is anonymous and many of the people who voted for Brexit have since died – in some cases as a consequence of their vote already, so those ones should really get special mentions.”
Brexit certainly meets the criteria for the Darwin Awards, namely:
1. It was self-inflicted.
2. It showed astonishingly stupid judgement.
3. The population were capable of sound judgement but still went for it.
The only question mark against the award is the injury of innocent bystanders, as many people voted against Brexit or abstained, and they are going to suffer through no fault of their own. However, the scale of cock-up involved here has persuaded the awards committee to make an exception.
The presentation of an award to an entire country is not without precedent, the island of Malta was awarded the George Cross in 1942 but of course that was for bravery in the face of the Nazis, and not mass stupidity.
The Darwin Awards Committee had been considering giving the entire United States of America an award in 2017 after the inauguration of Donald Trump, but decided against it on the grounds that it was possible to recover from that brief bout of insanity.
We can only hope the UK recovers its own sanity soon enough to have the award annulled.