being frank

I love this quote by Shannon Alder: The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.

So, what’s happening in your neck of the woods? I would venture to say that many of you are keeping a keen eye on the news. With the amount of dangerous buffoonery going on around the world, many of us wake up wondering what else may have transpired while we were sleeping. And when we don’t hear any news, well, that’s when our levels of concern get ratcheted up a notch or two.

Back in the day when we generally paid closer attention to nature and each other without the aid of anything electronic, we were habitually attuned to the existence of signs. Celestial bodies, weather patterns, animal/human behavior, crops – all of these and others were symptomatic of changes that were either probable or imminent. People would assess these signs and make a concerted effort to mitigate any potential problems. Change is inevitable; reacting to it is another matter altogether.

Common sense is a glorious thing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said, Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. It’s that feeling, that in your gut awareness that helps you quickly assess the validity or surety of any given action, thought or experience. Some folks like to think that they’re imbued with enormous quantities of common sense, while others don’t have the sense to know better. It is one of our more common and maligned senses, yet it remains unnervingly elusive.

These days, I believe that our common sense is screaming at us. There are signs appearing so often that they’ve become ordinary, typical – unexceptional. Our belief system is predicated on the notion that we all have, to one degree or another, the ability to discern what is right or wrong. This is our common sense. It’s a functional ability that allows us to judge routine occurrences by a set of standards that most of us can accept and comprehend. Granted, some folks may be better at it than others. But the vast majority of us would not put out a fire if we were cold or block out the light when it’s difficult to see. Common sense dictates it’s so. It’s simple, straightforward – and very susceptible to the deleterious effects of deliberate lies or malicious subterfuge.

Information designed to be a cudgel makes no sense at all, no matter the source. It should be designed to arm your common sense with facts that educate and advise, not cast aspersions or blatantly convince you of anything. Common sense doesn’t need convincing; it needs the ability to reason out the facts and face the truth of the matter. A truth unvarnished and not sugar-coated to sway it away from its true north. Whenever we stray from what our gut tells us is true, we face the risk of reinventing old mistakes. The Spanish philosopher and writer, George Santayana, is known for his quote about history: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yet one of his lesser-known quotes that strikes a more relevant chord today is this: The idea that horrors are required to give zest to life and interest to art is the idea of savages, men of no experience worth mentioning, and of merely servile, limited sensibilities. Don’t tolerate it. With all that is going on these days and with the amount of insubstantial information buffeting our sensibilities, there was never a more timely and prescient notion to help realign our common sense.