Modern philosopher George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that.” (I was going to link to a video, but some of his language can be considered borderline indelicate.)

I bring this up because of the Cinnamon Challenge.

In case you’re not familiar, a participant in the Cinnamon Challenge takes a big spoonful of cinnamon and tries to swallow it. This always results in the participant ejecting the cinnamon from his or her mouth in hilarious cloud form.

On its own, I wouldn’t consider this particularly stupid. We’ve all embarked on projects we knew were destined to fail.

In my day, we’d eat saltines. The goal was to eat as many saltines as you could in a minute without drinking any water. Then you’d try to break that record.

That wasn’t stupid at all. It was a competition. By trying to break a record, to improve ourselves, we were advancing the cause of all mankind.

What we didn’t do is record video of it and post it on youtube.

That’s stupid.

In the past week, I’ve accidentally walked into a women’s restroom, hit a janitor with a large pane of glass from an end table and hit a “push to exit” button about half a dozen times before realizing the door opened the opposite direction. I did not post video of any of these embarrassing encounters on youtube.

Are we so starved for attention that we’ll humiliate ourselves for the whole world to see? Apparently, we are.

Now, we’ve got morning news shows warning us about how dangerous cinnamon is.

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” some suburban mother of teenagers was probably screaming at her television screen before she drove her kids to school because the bus is just a place where young street toughs gather to fire guns at each other and drink hand sanitizer.

“I don’t want you hanging out with Dakota from down the street anymore,” she’d tell her sons, Wyoming and Colorado. “His parents are into tarragon and I don’t like where that might lead.”

I’ll tell you where it leads: Dakota’s parents, Pocatello and Lake Havasu City, will start buying cinnamon for him and his friends.

“They’re going to do it anyway,” they’ll tell the neighbors. “And we feel like they’d be safer in an environment we can control.”

That’s going to lead to more youtube videos with hashtags, which will lead to warning labels on cinnamon, which will only make more kids want to take the Cinnamon Challenge.

The next thing you know, the House Subcommittee on Cinnamon and Dung Beetle Research is holding hearings.

Pictures of a presidential candidate using cinnamon will emerge.

“I only used it once in a turnover,” he’ll explain. His poll numbers will plunge 17 percent.

The next thing you know, responsible spice users like you and me will have to ask a pharmacist to give us some cinnamon from behind the counter.

All because kids today don’t know how to keep their mouths shut.