We’ve left common sense in the rearview mirror.

If you need evidence, climb in the car and we’ll take a drive.

First, we’ll visit a highway sign in a rural county just south of here.

“Rough road ahead.”

On my last visit the warning sign had been there for more than a decade. It makes you wonder why the county didn’t fix the problem instead of posting a sign.

Then again, signs are cheaper than common sense.

Next comes a tour of school zones. Within a 30-minute radius of Decatur, you can pass the classrooms of eight public school systems.

That’s eight superintendents, eight administrative staffs and several sets of buses.

What would happen if there were only one school system per county or, heaven forbid, one system per region?

How much education money would we save on bureaucracy if we only had to pay one superintendent and his staff?

How much better educated would our children be if they attended schools with enough students to justify the schools’ existence — with enough students to provide advanced courses?

When it comes to schools, common sense loses; turf wins.

All this driving is making me hungry. Let’s stop at the grocery store.

There, we can buy food enclosed in plastic packaging with a handle. Then we can use the handle to lower the packages into plastic bags with handles. When we get home, we can toss the plastic packaging and plastic bags into a larger plastic garbage bag, and forget about them.

Don’t think about how much petroleum it took to produce all that plastic. Don’t worry about the mounds of garbage at the public landfill.

Sure, we could stuff a bunch of bags into one bag, put them in the trunk and reuse them on our next shopping trip. Or we could buy permanent bags and reuse them for every food trip.

But, that would require a little effort and people in the grocery store might stare at us for having more sense than they have.

It’s your turn to drive.

You should be able to spot solutions to problems everywhere.

All it takes is a little horse sense.

We have a Department of Transportation. We have a Department of Education, Department of Public Health and Department of Defense.

Maybe we need a Department of Common Sense.

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