Nation suffers from lack of common sense
Gas up the F150 pickup, hitch it to a high-sided trailer and let us go get some common sense. It could heal America.
Common sense, the sort we learned on our mother’s knee, would end the bitter, angry, underhanded and sick jostling for power between Republicans and Democrats, Trumpites and anti-Trumpites, liberals and conservatives. “Don’t fight,” mother said. “Walk away.”
Common sense, the kind they taught us in elementary school, would do away with our sorry but never subsiding sexism, racism and homophobia. “Play nice with everyone,” Miss Perry told us in first grade.
The common sense we learned from our everyday business dealings would lead us away from the demeaning and unprincipled gap in wealth between the haves and have nots, whether it is between men and women, black and white, management and labor. When one person prospers, everyone prospers, our dealings tell us.
Over, over and over we experience the benefits of a civility where everyone wins.
The common sense value of listening would teach us that kneeling football players are being good citizens and that patriotism is more complex than standing at attention simply to make a would-be despot feel good.
Common sense patriotism is staying away from cheating or stealing from one another.
Nobody need tell us to stay away from street drugs and hoarding prescription opioids. The danger is obvious.
Taking care of everything we have, including our planet, preserves our heritage. Everyone knows that. We need not argue over whether a certain trend in the weather is good or bad. Consider this week’s news: A privileged, wealthy white man calls an admittedly pompous black woman a dog. She calls him a racist. He is president of the United States; she was his hiring, an aide paid $200,000 a year to, everyone in the know says, do nothing. Even schoolchildren know that is wrong.
A judge in New Mexico grants freedom without bail to three women and two men who were harboring starving children in a filthy compound, teaching the eldest how to shoot up a school and hiding the body of a toddler in a tunnel filled with human waste. She declared they were not a danger to society.
That’s the sort of situation we teach when we urge our youngsters not to play with matches.
We have the truck and the trailer. Where do we go to get common sense?
It is not a long trip. Common sense lurks within the dark web of our being, a God-given talent and experience-nourished instinct that says if we’d just stop for a moment and consider what could go wrong with actions forged of hate, selfish competitiveness, greed and revenge for real and imagined slights.
Remember Rodney King, whose beating by Los Angeles cops led to riots.
“Can we all get along?” he mumbled on TV.
He became the subject of ridicule for knowing what our leaders, our scholars and the powerful ignore: common sense.