You would have had to be living under a rock for the past year not to know that the United States, and the rest of the world for that matter, has been experiencing an economic recession. It has been the top story in the media with 24-hour coverage of the government’s efforts to fix the economy.

Our newspapers and televisions have been filled with the heart-wrenching stories of the suffering of people who have lost their jobs; their homes; their savings; their retirement; and, in some cases, their minds.

This recession has impacted farmers, factory workers, top management, middle management, skilled workers, unskilled workers, students, homemakers, pundits and politicians. As a result, people all over this nation and the world are doing something they have not done in quite a while - they are using their common sense.

Thomas Edison once said, “The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”

According to the U.S. census department, more and more people are starting to act with a little more common sense. Just released census data shows Americans are delaying marriage, putting off home buying and turning to carpools. The AP story on the release of this new data called it a “disruption of American life.” I say that it is about time people came to their senses.

For too long, Americans have lived beyond their means, piling up debt, buying what they want, and doing what they want without regard for the future consequences. We got married when we could not support ourselves let alone a family; bought houses we could not afford; and turned our 401K investments over to nameless managers with no thought to what they were doing with our money.
We let our leaders play politics rather than demanding they keep an eye on the economy. So here we are standing in an economic ash heap of our own making.

But, being the resourceful and resilient Americans that we are, many are taking the advice of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.”

There are many Americans who are waiting for the government to bail them out; many others, however, are making changes in their lives and taking their destiny into their own hands. They are cutting expenses, working harder, finding new careers, starting their own businesses and more.

For the first time in decades, the U.S. savings rate has started to go up. Washington continues to believe that it has the answer and its actions will turn the economy around.

But as Will Rodgers pointed out, “You can’t legislate intelligence and common sense into people.”

Instead, if you give people the freedom and the incentive to improve their lives, they will. Preliminary data found that many Americans were not moving, staying put in big cities rather than migrating to Sunbelt states because of frozen lines of credit. Mobility is at a 60-year low. People are digging in and doing what it takes to make things work where they are.

Another side effect of the recession, in addition to igniting a latent level of common sense in many people, is the solution to one of our most politically divisive issues of the past decade: immigration. The census data shows that immigration into the United States has dropped off in the past six months.

According to the report, “This was due to declines in low-skilled workers from Mexico searching for jobs in the states of Arizona, Florida and California.”

Nationwide, the foreign-born population dipped last year to under 38 million after it reached an all-time high in 2007.

As people struggle with changing economic circumstances, perhaps some of the traditional values of rural America will continue to come to the fore: hard work; frugality; innovation; self reliance; and, most of all, common sense.

If this sounds a bit old fashioned, remember the words of Henry Ward Beecher, “The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.”

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.

Published on Sept. 30, 2009