Is Common Sense Dead?
I wonder what Thomas Paine would think?
Common Sense seems increasingly uncommon.
In his pamphet titled “Common Sense”, Thomas Paine, in 1775, shared with the world his views on governance, which included a devotion to democracy at the most local level possible. He was railing against the faraway British Monarchy at the time, but the same principles could hold true today as to how many feel about our own government.
While the disconnect between the government and the governed seems to get ever wider, in New England, we have always shared Paine’s devotion to local democratic principles.
The Town Meeting.
The Town Meeting form of government is the last bastion of democracy and an examination of the “Common Sense”.
From it’s earliest roots in New England’s heritage, the Town Meeting has offered the citizenry direct say in how they were governed and that included bedrock principles of self-governance and self-reliance. Our model of governing was the wonder of the world and heavily influential upon intellectual giants like Toqueville, Jefferson and Paine.
Town Meeting relied heavily on a set of guiding principles we referred to as the “Common Sense”. In order for Town Meeting to work, there needed to be some set of commonly understood parameters and basic rules to live by.
Having lived my whole life in a bucolic New England town, I can report from the front lines……
Things ain’t what they used to be.
I grew up here. As a young man, I worked for WW2 Vets and they really did not talk much, if at all, about their experiences in The War.
What they did talk about were simple principles and a fierce devotion to Freedom in a way I am not sure we can comprehend. Freedom, to those of us who were blessed to not have fought to preserve it, is an academic topic. Freedom to those guys meant something much more.
They talked about stone walls a lot. In fact, I spent some of my mis-spent youth helping those old guys fix theirs. It seemed important to them. Keep the cows close to home they would say. Whether they owned cows or not.
Took me a minute.
They talked about how important it was to not need “government” help and how, if we pulled together, we can raise a barn or help a neighbor in distress or just follow our own guide in general matters of every day life.
Without a Permit.
Common Sense.
I worked with a old guy in my town when I was like a 24 year old freshly appointed Tax Assessor (I wanted a career in politics for like a minute). He had fought his way from Normandy to Germany. He told me that the way they used to set the tax rate for the town was for the Selectboard to get together out in a field on a bail of hay, reckon with the issue and deliberate as to what was fair and what folks could afford. They set the tax rate right then and there.
Think about that. That is how things used to work in my lifetime.
Those folks were so dialed into the community, they had the pulse of the “Common Sense”. They understood that the “Common Sense” reflected the vast majority of perspectives in the Town, making it a loose, yet effective interpretation of the democratic process.
Now we do that through Codes and Regulations. Codes and Regulations, written into law in a faraway place in Boston, and that require an apparatus to enforce them.
I ran into an old Townie friend the other day that reminded me of the time in/or around 1989, when the Town Constable asked for an actual cop car. He fairly noted to the Selectboard that the kids were tossing their cookies in the back of his station wagon every time he broke up a keg party and had to bring them home to their pissed off parents.
At Town Meeting that year, this cop car acquisition request was debated hotly. Some old timers at the time were of the opinion that, while the Constable’s concern was plausible, the trade off in potential risks to personal liberties could pose a problem. Some of the old codgers went as far as to call it the old “slippery slope”. They dared to argue that in the future this measure would lead to a full Police Department with 2 squad cars, and radar guns, and real guns, fancy uniforms, and those legging things that state cops wear, and a whole bunch of other stuff would come to pass.
They were shouted and voted down by loud voices that swore that would never happen and the old timers were being paranoid.
And it did. Happen. The cop cars and stuff. All of it.
And now today, the Selectboard of our little bucolic town has a Police Department to deploy. Typically, at the request of some well-meaning, but “ain’t from around here”, folks that have moved to our bucolic little town in New England and brought with them expectations from the other place.
Expectations that include ratting out their neighbors if anything that they disagree with is being done.
BBQ too smoky and it is drifiting across my lawn? Call the cops.
In a town of about 1200 people.
So, yes, things have changed.
Many would say for the better. Many would argue that codes and regulations are better than Common Sense. Some would argue the government is in the best position to adjudicate Common Law.
Some would rather call an 800# and report their neighbor, than to just open a window and yell across the lawn at them.
Some think Common Sense outdated.
I just won’t be one of them.
