Over at Spectator USA, Sam Leith'sarticle with the title "Common sense is the real generation gap" caught my interest.
I thought I knew where he was headed. After all, common sense has probably always been the real generation gap. Growing up (as opposed to only getting older) is mostly a matter of actually acquiring the common sense that experience of life gives us the opportunity to acquire. People older than us had a head start, and we are supposed to try to catch up. Mark Twain probably said it best: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
As we all know, acquiring common sense can be a matter of life and death. I'm thinking, for example, of the teenage boy who swallowed a garden slug on a dare, became paralyzed, and died recently. Because children lack common sense, parents must do what they have always done, trying to instill common sense in their children while at the same time using their own common sense to encompass the growing child.
The topic suggested by Leith's title has added importance today. Becoming a person of common sense has always been a life-defining challenge, but acquiring common sense has gotten a lot more difficult for young people in our time, especially if they have spent some time in our institutions of higher learning. My witty friend Robert Godwin has this to say about that: "Say what you want about the liberal arts, but they've found a cure for common sense."
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