Common Sense

I finished Lord of the Rings again last week. That 'Scouring of the Shire' chapter really got to me. It felt like Tolkien's statement on civil disobenience and it's role in defining our world.

I'm sure it was more than that but I liked, and picked up on, that. We find the messages and lessons we're after. Frodo and the boys returned home, fresh from saving middle earth, to find things a bit different then they'd left them. The quick and dirty of it is that modern civilization and industrialization moved in and displaced respect and cohabitation along with the general goodwill towards each other.

Trees had been ripped up, social gathering magnets like the Inn's were closed, obscure rules had replaced common sense and were enforced by a new policed state. Frodo didn't waste any time putting it all back to the way it was. Or was it his buddies?

It gets me thinking about common sense, more importantly our sometimes lack of it. We have, over the course of a few centuries and decades, replaced our need for common sense with rules. There's no need to exercise common sense when you've got a rule book in your pocket to take care of that for you.

So, more and more, we have generations of people growing up without ever having to use that skill we call common sense. It's the old quandry, can we have a world of people with common sense when they've never exercised it? Can you raise a responsible child by handling all responsibility for them? Can you mentor a sound decision maker by making decisions for them? Is it possible there's a link between our abandonment of common sense and, I don't know, say a rise in crime?

Looks like I'm running for office again...