It may seem pre­sump­tu­ous, if not con­tra­dic­to­ry to say on a web­site tout­ing itself as “an atyp­i­cal per­spec­tive”, that some things in this world demand noth­ing more than a straight­for­ward view from the per­spec­tive of com­mon sense.

How­ev­er, there also seems to be an inor­di­nate num­ber of peo­ple who have either allowed greed to over­come their com­mon sense, or have none at all and assume the rest of us don’t either.
One new(ish) prod­uct gives every indi­ca­tion that its inven­tors and mar­keters fit all three of those pos­si­bil­i­ties — caf­feine pouches.
Designed to be placed between lip and gums, depend­ing on the strength (pouch­es vary) and num­ber used, they can  “….add up pret­ty quick­ly, to two, four, six cups of cof­fee, all at once, going straight to the bloodstream.”
Social media plat­forms like Tik­Tok show young peo­ple try­ing the pouch­es, point out they’re easy to buy online and bal­ly­hoo that they can help keep you awake in class.
Most of us know how tedious to the point of nerve-wrack­ing it can be to deal with over-caf­feinat­ed co-work­ers. Imag­ine a class­room pop­u­lat­ed by kids pop­ping caf­feine pouch­es, often sup­ple­ment­ing them with caf­feine-infused ener­gy drinks.
But don’t wor­ry, being ever sen­si­ble, pouch man­u­fac­tur­ers insist they’re “not meant for minors”.
Which is no doubt why the pouch­es come in flavours that include: choco­late, red gum­my bear, pink lemon­ade and man­go crush.
Some man­u­fac­tur­ers put a “not for minors” warn­ing on their pack­ag­ing. The effect of that, as any­one who remem­bers their ado­les­cent years, or  has teenagers of their own knows, is a guar­an­teed sign­post to temptation.
Add in the  long-estab­lished and pub­li­cised fact that the ratio­nal part of a male teen’s brain isn’t ful­ly devel­oped and won’t be until age 25 or so, and you’ve found a lev­el a cyn­i­cism in the name of prof­it that def­i­nite­ly requires a total sus­pen­sion of com­mon sense.

                    THEN AGAIN…

In Ten­nessee, schools must now teach chil­dren as young as five  “to iden­ti­fy a trig­ger, a bar­rel and a muz­zle as they’re intro­duced to rudi­men­ta­ry gun safety.”
That seems to me to be turn­ing a blind eye to avoid even the pos­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing to look a gen­uine­ly appalling prob­lem in the face.
Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, gun deaths involv­ing chil­dren in the state are 37 per­cent above the U.S. nation­al aver­age, but stronger gun stor­age require­ments are a non-priority.
A sim­i­lar myopia over­came Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors (Is that an oxy­moron?) from sev­er­al north­ern states, who com­plained that smoke from Cana­di­an wild­fires was spoil­ing their con­stituents’ sum­mer, and called on the Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment “to take imme­di­ate and deci­sive action to con­tain these fires and pre­vent future wildfires.”
No men­tion was made of wild­fires rag­ing across sev­er­al U.S. states, the fact that the feroc­i­ty and fre­quen­cy of the fires is direct­ly relat­ed to cli­mate change, or to the Trump administration’s shred­ding of envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions and roll­back of cli­mate initiatives.
Amer­i­cans carp­ing at Cana­da for wild­fire smoke makes as much sense as an out­field­er miss­ing a catch, and then blam­ing the bat­ter for not hit­ting the ball straight into his glove.
But then, those whose busi­ness helped bring the dire sit­u­a­tion about, and have the tech­no­log­i­cal know-how and resources to slow the process, don’t seem to see much sense in mak­ing it a priority.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, whose com­pa­ny pumped a record amount of gas and oil in the last quar­ter, said in a recent inter­view: “When the world stops using oil and gas, we’ll stop look­ing for it. ”
Wouldn’t it make more sense to con­cen­trate on inno­va­tion and invest­ment in non-renew­able ener­gy sources at a rate faster than oil depletes? Oil com­pa­ny sci­en­tists were decades ahead of their time when it came to aware­ness of the dis­as­trous effect of fos­sil fuels on the cli­mate, so there’s no rea­son to assume they can’t take the lead on the quest for  green energy.
On a more mun­dane but no less dan­ger­ous lev­el, the unwill­ing­ness, and in some cas­es inabil­i­ty to look at real­i­ty square on, may have a lot to do with hav­ing easy ways to avoid doing so.
An attendee at recent recruit­ing dri­ve for more ICE agents explained his ambi­tion to join what, depend­ing on your point of view, is a Gestapo-like scourge or the front line in a fight for nation­al sal­va­tion this way: “On social media you’re going to get the sto­ries that fit what you want to believe, based on the algo­rithm. You nev­er get the true story.”
The pos­si­bil­i­ty that includes what­ev­er social media out­lets led him to want to join the recruit­ment ral­ly, appar­ent­ly didn’t reg­is­ter in his frontal lobe.
Or, as a local sage here put it: “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, com­mon sense isn’t a flower  that grows in everybody’s garden.”

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