Common sense in very uncommon because the public fool system no longer teaches the art of logical, rational thinking. It has been supplanted and subverted by policical correctness. Never mind the facts.
Common sense, manners, kindness, charity and the need for prayer get best results when taught at home. Yet, sometimes it unfortunately takes a bad experience or two to get people to awaken as it were. Example . . .
I was about eight or may a little beyond nine and my grandad was out on the tractor working in one of the back fields. However, he'd put a pot of beans on the stove to cook slow, not uncommon, and be ready by dinner time. He may not have set the burner on our electric stove quite low enough because in a while smoke started coming out of the pot.
Mind you, I was a very bright country kid who was pretty good in school, loved to read and who knew how to do all kinds of practical stuff. BUT I guess my thoughts could grow so lofty that sometimes the obvious could easily escape me. I'd no problem realizing that something needed to be done and my snap decision was that, gee, I'd better tell my grandfather about this pronto. I ran like a race horse all the way down to the field to get the old man but by the time we'd got back to the house the contents of the pot had caught fire.
Grandpa handled everything very methodically. First, he turned off the stove, doused the stuff burining in the pot and then set it aside to let it soak to make cleaning out the charred beans easier. Next, he came looking for me. I got my behind blistered. Why? Failure to exercise plain old common sense. All I had to do was turn off the stove when the pot had first begun to smoke and there would have been no problem whatsoever. The moral to the story is that sometimes it takes all that to make us do something very simple -- think. Yes, I got the message but it didn't quite sink in.
School was out for the summer and I was home. My grandfather had to drive into town but before he left the house he specifically told me that I was not to turn the TV on. Well, I was bored and not at all pleased with the idea. "What the heck," I cleverly thought, "I'll just turn the thing on and then turn it off when I hear the car come up the driveway."
As expected, about an hour later I heard the car, I jumped up, turned off the TV and sat down in our kitchen making a best attempt at looking innocent. Who knew that the first thing Grandpa would do was walk into the living room and place his hand on the top of our tubed TV to see if it was warm? Needless to say, things turned out for me exactly the same as they had over the bean incident.
Common sense says there are some things that there's just no getting round. Thus, the woman with the Kirby had to learn the same the hard way as also a most unfortunate young man I read of who set himself alight while using a vacuum cleaner to draw gasoline from a motor vehicle.
Venson
