Common Sense

My Dad is a simple man. He didn’t make it past the eighth grade. He worked in the factory doing piece work for his entire working life. He hired himself out to a local farmer as a “hand”, not because he needed the money, but because he enjoyed the simple life of a small farm. He is not a good debater. He is not well educated. He does not subscribe to the Harvard Business Review. His favorite author is probably a tossup between Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour; however, what my Dad does have, is a healthy dose of common sense.

            I remember watching him thoroughly clean, oil, and sharpen a borrowed chainsaw before returning it; wash, wax, change the oil and fill with gasoline his brother-in-law’s pickup truck before returning it; thoroughly clean the deck, then remove and sharpen the blade of a neighbor’s borrowed lawn mower before returning it. “Robert”, he’d say, “Always return anything you borrow, better than when you got it!” 

            I came home from sixth grade one time and told Dad about someone picking on me, threatening to beat me up. “Robert”, he said, “Don’t ever start a fight, but never run from one, either. And if the [bleep] (Dad had quite a vocabulary of colorful metaphors) is bigger than you, get something to even the odds, but never run. You’ll run for the rest of your life.” 

            One time my brother and I were “helping” him work on the old pickup truck. Well, at least our intentions were to work on it, but the hood latch was difficult to pop at best, and impossible at worst. He kept a small pry bar in the cab to help the latch along, and was working both that latch and his temper into quite a frenzy. 

“Pry, twist, pry, pry, twist . . . swear . . .  pry, twist.“ 

Even as a kid, I could see where this was going.

“Pry, twist” . . . increasing frenzy and muttering of a string of colorful metaphors . . . “twist, WHAM!”

He took that pry bar a slammed it across the hood of that truck, putting a nice, obvious crease across it. (The old truck really wasn’t much account anyway.)

He dropped his shoulders and looked over at us and said, “Well THAT was stupid!” 

No excuses, no blaming latch or the old, practically worn out truck, just accepting responsibility for his own actions . . . common sense.

I’ve learned so much from that dear, uneducated, hot tempered Dad of mine, because he was a man of common sense, common sense that I’m afraid is rather uncommon these days. It wasn’t all that long ago that knowing what was right, and knowing what was wrong was pretty obvious. People . . . most people, anyway, and if you weren’t most people, you were the odd ball . . . understood what was right and just did it, and they understood what was wrong and didn’t do that: and if they did something wrong or stupid, accepted responsibility and paid the consequences for it. 

The old prophet Isaiah in chapter 5, verse 20 of his prophesy saw the disappearance of common sense coming, and had this to say about it: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

The definitions of right and wrong, good and evil, have been turned on their heads, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Way down deep in our souls, we know the difference. We just need to be bold, like my Dad, and make uncommon sense common again.