Dixie Divas
Where did all the common sense go?
By RONDA RICH
Have you noticed how many people don't have any common sense? A serious epidemic has swept our country and wiped out a lot of common

By Ronda Rich

sense.

It's sad to say but common sense, for a whole lot of people, is as gone as Co-colas that cost a dime.

To Southerners, common sense was always a point of pride, especially for those in the rural South where schooling was scarce so the man with the most good ol' common horse sense was the valedictorian of the community.

My daddy had an uncle like that up in the North Georgia mountains, who Daddy revered until Uncle Oscar Cannon's life ended when he was well into his nineties. Uncle Oscar and his wife, Aunt Fairy, lived on a beautiful, large piece of land where magnificent oaks towered high in the sky and a gentle creek twisted lazily through the front yard on its way to meet the Chattahoochee River somewhere down the way.

He farmed that land for his family but he was an ingenious Scotch-Irish who found a way to make a buck in all kinds of ways. He was a craftsman who, late in life, made a right nice living by selling hand-made spinning wheels to the city folks from Atlanta who were quite amazed that his aging hands were so deft and talented.

Uncle Oscar, though, didn't just sell spinning wheels to those folks. He always threw in a few stories, which he would leisurely tell from his rocking chair on the front porch. He was quite a sage.

His common sense was unparalleled, making him the valedictorian in his neck of the woods near Turner's Corner. Somewhere in the 1920s, he heard that the government would pay to pick up the kids scattered through the Appalachian foothills and drive them to the simple one room schoolhouse. So, Uncle Oscar took a pick-up truck, built sideboards, added a roof to it and turned it into a homemade, but very serviceable, school bus. He made $60 a month, a nice chunk of money to a young mountain man.

"Common sense is wisdom with its sleeves rolled up," is a quote I read the other day. Trouble is there's a new generation who's had it so easy that they haven't had to roll their sleeves up, literally or figuratively. Down the road, there is a price coming for such an easy upbringing.

Common sense is gained when you have to figure out how to do something that you don't have the education to know how to do.

"Why don't you hire someone to do that?" Claudette will ask when I take on a project where I haven't a clue what I'm doing.

"That's the easy way out. This way I can broaden my knowledge and experience."

She'll just shake her head and sigh.

When my doorbell failed and no one could tell me why, I took it apart and set to work. It took two hours but I finally figured it out. The electrician had failed to install the diode when he connected the push button. There wasn't an electrical current to tell the chimes to ring eight times. So I fixed it.

Two hours earlier, I didn't even know what a diode was.

"You're a genius!" pronounced Brandon, who helps me around the house.

I shook my head. "Just the utilization of common sense."

I'm not all that smart but I'm bound and determined to fight for my common sense. Personally, I'd rather have it than an armful of doctorate degrees.

Sad to say, though, but for the most part, common sense isn't all that common any more.

Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of What Southern Women Know (That Every Woman Should) and The Town That Came A-Courtin'.