A next step

Here are these persons, these individuals, these physical beings – these women and these men – who are placing their two feet inside circles marked with white chalk on the ground, six feet distant from one another, the lower half of their face hidden as if by an accident victim’s bandage, waiting to move to the circle ahead in the line, so as to obtain the rice, vegetables, bread, milk, oil they need, under the surveillance of masked police armed with sticks: whatever has happened to them? There is no war but all the roads are almost deserted, the children no longer play in the open, the air is calm – indeed the sky is clearer -: what is happening?

***

But, after all, what is “common sense”?

What do we try to define with this term?

Is it the natural instinct?

Is it the elementary logic born out of shared experience and observation, verified by others – therefore objective? - of physical existence and physical laws? Or is it also, at least in part or implicitly, something like the intelligence of the heart? Or else is it perhaps the fruit of a prolonged and attentive discernment confirmed in time as well as in space? Of a recording and witnessing as sober and neutral – as impersonal – as possible of those phenomena that tend to occur in our human existence? Or is it too the contents of our inculcated moral sense, of our attachment to known or transmitted laws and habits: “it is the way it is and cannot be otherwise, one cannot change the laws of Nature …!”

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