What is Common Sense as it Pertains to COVID-19?
Recently, it has become often that, in regard to COVID-19 precautions, people are slinging the notion of Common Sense at one another as though there is an actual baseline for what Common Sense is. So, I looked up the definition of Common Sense.
As per Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Common Sense is ": sound and prudent judgement based on a simple perception of the situation or facts". (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common%20sense)
This begs the question; What are the "facts" of our current situation that we can all acknowledge as our common understanding, or Common Sense? Therein is the dilemma.
Masks vs. No Masks.... Vaccine vs. No Vaccine..... Lockdown vs. No Lockdown....
Now, like everyone else, I have my opinions and biases. However, I cannot consider myself a rational person if I do not acknowledge the obvious fact that many doctors, scientists, and researchers, who I think are probably more intelligent than I, have differing opinions, statistics, explanations, & demonstrated facts. What is a fact, is that statistics and studies can be manipulated and framed in such a way to demonstrate whatever you want them to say. Ask any scientist, researcher, or statistician and they will whole-heatedly agree.
What I perceive to be more credible, self-evident common ground, is that most of us alive today have never lived through a time such as what we are in right now. Another credible, self-evident common ground is that the full truth does not lie in either extreme, but rather in the coming together of those extremes, each bringing their remnants of objective, demonstrable truth, in order to collaborate in putting all the pieces together. That is how we find a more comprehensive picture (and resulting solution).
Common Sense, in our current time, is not attacking & bullying people with the remnants of information you believe to be facts, while masking your own fear behind pontifications and grandstanding, as if you have some actual moral or intellectual ground upon which to do so. Other than the experts actively studying COVID-19, vaccines, masks, lock-downs, etc..., all anyone is doing is regurgitating something that somebody else studied, wrote, or repeated. Pretend otherwise and you lose all credibility.
Be kind to one another. We are sharing a common experience of facing a potentially lethal threat to which all of us are vulnerable. Now, more than ever before, the Common Sense approach is to pull together, each with whatever facts we think we hold, so that we can place those facts side by side, recognizing the contexts, biases, presumptions, breakthroughs, flaws and genius in all of them in order to distill actual truth that can be repeated consistently with consistent results. Then we can make more informed and unified decisions about our shared course of action. Therein lies a Common Sense that you, your family, and your community call all agree upon. Somebody somewhere is going to get it right! When they do, we will all benefit.
- Jeff Crawford "Nashville's Shaman®"