Don't You Have Common Sense?

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Trevor Noah, and producers of The Daily Show sometimes take cameras to the street and ask voters about the state of America and why they will vote for this candidate and not the other one.

Some answers are funny. Others ridiculous, but what lingers in one’s mind is the sadness, that during elections, people voluntarily surrender common sense.

Common sense is how mothers bring up kids. Don’t touch the kettle or heater with wet hands. Electricity will zap you. Look left or right before you cross the road. Wash your hands before you touch that hamburger.

Kids grow up and they embrace common sense. They even threaten younger brothers and sisters: I’ll tell Mom you didn’t brush your teeth.

Therefore, it is baffling when adult voters over 25 years have no common sense, when it comes to voting, a process that might find their sons and daughters in another part of the world, guns and drones ablaze fighting TikTok creators.

Common sense is embalmed. That is why politicians on the campaign trail make Asia the enemy, when capitalism in Canada and the U.S. have profit-driven laws that send manufacturing jobs to China and other parts of Asia.

Common sense is embalmed when candidates for the White House use race as a problem. Blacks are out there to get you, when African Americans are fighting for the basic right to be alive, in the so-called greatest country in the world, and not shot in the back by what the police did to Jacob Blake, end of August 2020.

It is an issue because there are no records of white men shot in the back by the police, or shot because police thought they were going to commit crimes, by the nature of their whiteness.

Because common sense is embalmed, on hold, candidates always convince voters that Americans should vote against each other, and not against capitalism, that has made them lose their homes to live in trailer parks and sons and daughters forced to join the army to keep the family home.

The ‘22 U.S. Mid-terms are coming. Will common sense prevail?

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang. 

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