With all due apologies to anyone this column may resemble, we’ve become a nation of idiots. I don’t think I’m being too harsh.

This has been a subject of study of mine for some time. I first started thinking about this a few years back when that woman sued McDonald's because its coffee was too hot. She had bought a cup of coffee at the fast-food restaurant’s drivethrough, then placed the cup between her legs as she drove off.

Somehow the coffee spilled and she ended up with severe burns.

Maybe the coffee was too hot. But why did she put hot coffee between her legs in the first place?

I’m not a Rhodes Scholar. I didn’t graduate magna cum anything from college. But I’m smart enough to know that coffee is supposed to be hot and if you put a cup of coffee between your legs, then accidentally spill said coffee, you’re going to get burned in an area of your body that you’d prefer didn’t get burned.

I don’t need a message printed on the side of the coffee cup to know that. But there it is on nearly every cup of coffee I buy: Contents are hot.

Not long after that, a young man, who had had more than his fair share of cold beer, fell from the upper deck of a baseball stadium in the Northeast and died. So now, many stadiums have signs: “Please do not lean over the railing.”

The most recent example that has me on my soapbox this morning involves voice mail.

Recently, I called a friend. She didn’t answer the phone, so the call went to her voice mail, where I heard her voice say, “Hi, this is Katie. I can’t answer your call. So leave me a message and I’ll call you back.”

That part made sense. But then another female voice came on. “At the tone, please record your message. After you’ve finished recording, hang up.”

Really? I should hang up after I finish a call? Just who is making cell phone calls these days?

You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to not know to hang up after you’ve left someone a phone message.

I suppose that before this woman started offering this sage advice on our voice mail, there were millions of people who simply walked around with their phone still up to their ears, wondering what to do next.

“Well, I left a message. Do I just stay on the line and wait for them? Or can I hang up? Man, I wish there were some instructions with this.”

I don’t mean to be so cynical about my fellow human beings this morning. But there used to be such a thing known as common sense. My Webster’s defines common sense as “sound practical judgment.”

Unfortunately, it appears that common sense has gone the way of the dodo and the dial telephone. And that’s just sad. We expect someone else to warn us about things, instead of exercising our own minds.

I’m a huge fan of the old Warner Brothers cartoons. But years ago, I stopped watching them because television networks started editing them for air. Apparently — unbeknownst to me — watching Yosemite Sam try to blow up Bugs Bunny or watching Elmer Fudd shooting at Daffy Duck is bad because it might suggest to children that they try to emulate what they’ve seen in the cartoon.

I don’t think that ever worried my mother. She simply explained to me that I was watching a cartoon, and that it wasn’t real. As a result of her lesson, I never gave thought to jumping off a cliff to see if I could squash myself into an accordion, like Wile E. Coyote used to do at the end of all those unsuccessful attempts to catch the Road Runner.

Of course, honesty compels me to report that there weren’t many cliffs to jump off of in southwest Georgia. Perhaps it’s just as well.