As a little kid when I’d do something stupid my grandfather would say to me, “son, now show some common sense.” 

As an adult, I look around now and I wonder what has happened to common sense. In fact, I wonder if it should even be called common sense any more. If it were common sense, it would actually be common, meaning pretty much everywhere and not unusual. 

Kind of like the common cold. When you have a cold, you sneeze and you have a runny nose. Lots of people have those symptoms and everyone says they have a cold. Pretty common, right?

Since it is obvious judging from what we see, hear, and read about every day, calling common sense common is kind of like calling an open head wound a headache. It just doesn’t seem to fit what it is meant to describe.

A lack of what used to be called common sense these days leads people to do things that are, as mentioned before, stupid. Only too many times nowadays, the people at the core of the things in question aren’t little kids, but adults, supposedly in full control of their choices and decisions.

I use the word supposedly because I am not really sure who or what is actually leading some of them to do some things they do. I won’t even try to garner a guess as to why people do what they do. In the old days (like 50 years ago) folks would have probably blamed it on the devil.

Actually, now that I think of it, that probably isn’t a bad explanation. It’s as good as anything else I can come up with.

No, I can’t figure people out. I mean, I have a hard enough time trying to figure out simple things, like what socks go with what pants.

It would seem the older you get the more common sense you’d acquire. For the most part, in my experience older folks are far more full of it — it being common sense — than younger folks. That’s the way it should be.

Younger folks are obsessed with not wanting their odometers to turn. Older folks with more common sense know that such an approach doesn’t make a lot of sense. After all, to get old in the first place you’ve had to travel a long way and not every road is paved.

In other words, in the immortal words of Richard Pryor, you don’t get to be old by being stupid.

Maybe common sense just used to be a lot more common than it is today. Maybe it could be that as with other things, like the dodo bird and dinosaurs, it is just in the process of becoming extinct — or at least pushed in that direction.

I say pushed, because after all, mother nature might have done in the dinosaurs — but it was man that did in the dodo.

We humans have a nasty habit of doing away with things that are annoying or that we feel we have no use for. What we have always referred to as common sense is intrinsically tied into our conscience, which has an annoying habit of getting in the way of things we know we probably shouldn’t do but for lack of common sense do anyway.  

Maybe that’s why we’re seeing less and less of it.

So what is common sense anyway? In the old days, the basis for common sense was what many would call “conventional wisdom” —  stuff pretty much everyone took for granted that just about everybody and their brother just “knew.” There used to be a lot of stuff that people simply knew as a result of living day to day, and those people took it for granted that everyone else knew it, too, because everyone else was living in ways similar to them.

But somewhere along the line, life took a big turn away from the simplicity of life as everyone knew it. As our lives became increasingly compartmentalized and complicated, the standard rules of living life no longer seemed to fit everyone comfortably. The average person eventually became anything but average at all, and as a result, their lives and the common sense once found in it became whatever they felt it should be with little or no consideration to any kind of standard of measurement.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ve become so enamored with doing away with those standards in our world that we’ve unconsciously killed off the blessings of uniformity that gave us those common life experiences to determine what was and wasn’t common as far as sense was concerned.

That’s part of the reason I love living in a place like Thomasville so much, and want my family to be rooted here. We still have a strong sense of right and wrong, while at the same time respecting each other. If you think that’s common, you simply need to go down the road a little bit — and not too far either — and you’ll find how wrong you are.

I don’t know where it’s gone, but I sure wish common sense would show up a lot more often. And really, since it is so hard to find these days, maybe it’s time to retire what we’ve described as common sense in generations past.

So I propose we now call it “uncommon” sense. Makes common sense, doesn’t it?