Farewell Common Sense, You will be missed

David McCarthy

Undergraduate/ English Literature and History

A lot has happened during my time here at the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire, some for the better, much for the worse. I hoped that before I graduated in May I might be able to have one small article in The Flip Side, a publication I have read for some years now with amusement. The following piece of literature is based on an article written by Lori Borgman, called "The Death of Common Sense." Common Sense died a long time ago, few noticed its passing, but then again few were paying attention.

Common Sense started to get ill when high school students began sending naked pictures of themselves and their girlfriends to everyone they knew thinking it would be "funny." His situation became worse when strip searches of middle school students were allowed in an attempt to find drugs, traumatizing young individuals.

It certainly didn’t help when legislation was enacted allowing for college students living off campus to be punished for their actions off campus as if they lived on campus. Nor did it help when individuals under the drinking age thought that walking around campus with open intoxicants was perfectly legal and made no effort to hide what they were doing.

Common Sense’s health deteriorated rapidly after it was discovered that people not voicing the popular opinion were shot down and made to look like fools, as in the case of Miss California in the Miss USA Pageant. It only got worse after it was discovered that many students at the college level just "didn’t care" what their money was used for, as long as they could party and go to the bars whenever they wanted to.

Finally, Common Sense was beaten to death as the government decided that spending without any conscious and bailing out huge corporations at the expense of the American people was okay.

Do you still believe in common sense? I do, but it hurts to see the unbelievable amount of people who don’t and suffer because of it, after all, all one needs do is look at The Spectator’s Police Blotter to see just how badly some people are in need of common sense. While the political and economic situation in this country has been found to be lacking, let us hope that in the near future, by using a little "common sense" we can get things back on track.

Source:

Borgman, Lori. "The Death of Common Sense." <www.nmt.edu/~armiller/commonsen.htm.>


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