The Death of Common Sense?

It’s enough to put Georgie Porgie behind bars for years.

Kissed the girls: Sexual harassment, no doubt about it.

Made them cry: Statutory rape, open and shut.

When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away: Flight to avoid prosecution, throw away the key.

And why not? Not when educators are flunking logic by busting kids (some barely old enough to read rules, let alone spell e-x-p-u-l-s-h-u--n) for stealing a smooch, scoring a Midol, carrying a concealed penknife, even suspending one felonious 5-year-old for bootlegging Mom’s beeper on a field trip to a pumpkin patch.

Hence some common sense questions: Have we taken leave of our common senses? Goodbye Mr. Chips forever? Are today’s minds so open to political correctness that our brains have fallen out?

Absolutely, say many of life’s observers. With the added fret that adults, in their frantic obedience to rigid mandates, may even be meddling with youngsters’ genetically ordained behavior.

“Georgie Porgie is supposed to chase little girls,” says Betty Alice Erickson of Dallas, psychologist and keeper of the flame of the late Dr. Milton Erickson, pioneer hypnotherapist and confidant of anthropologist Margaret Meade. “And little girls are supposed to scream hysterically. And little boys are supposed to beat up other little boys.

“That’s normal. That’s healthy. The job of a parent or a teacher is to civilize, not remold.”

Of late, it seems to have become remolding without mercy.

* Bring a blade, cut your future: A 15-year-old Indiana honor student was expelled for taking a Swiss army knife to class. Apparently, regulations written to keep weapons off campus do not exempt penknives used for scraping resin gunk off a teenager’s violin strings.

* Ask Mom to use a tenderizer: A South Carolina 11-year-old was suspended for packing a steak knife in her lunch pail to cut up leftovers of home-cooked chicken.

* Menstrual cramps will be treated only on weekends: Two Ohio eighth-graders were expelled, but later plea-bargained both sentences down to suspensions, for sharing a two-tablet stash of Midol.

* On a scale of one to 10, Public Enemy No. 262,000,001: Beeper bandit Ryan Hudson, 5, of Newport News, Va., borrowed his mom’s pager to visit the Great Pumpkin. Ryan says he likes the noise when the beeper goes off. He was busted and sent home by a kindergarten teacher who played it by the book, and the book presumes pagers are paraphernalia of the drug trade.

* Not exactly Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill: Don Juan Johnathan Prevette, 6, of Lexington, N.C., hung a wet one on the cheek of a classmate. The towheaded lover was suspended for a day, banned from attending an ice cream party and sent home for what the school declared sexual harassment.

* And a San Fernando Valley 6-year-old was red-carded for playing tag during recess. Tag, you see, involves touching and that’s clearly groping and foreplay.

Sadly, such over-reactionary nonsense is not confined to kids and campus.

Last week, Sylvia Spayton, 62, of Cincinnati, committed an act of random kindness by feeding coins into a flagged parking meter to save a motorist from a ticket.

Cops weren’t so kind. They hauled her away on charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing official business. Grandma Spayton, no relation to Ma Barker, was arraigned and released on $1,500 bail.

Short circuits in the nation’s psyche, this de-evolution from dumber to dumbest, does not surprise psychologist Erickson. Schools, she says, are a microcosm of our society and reflect a general retreat from responsibility into mild cowardice. For it takes guts, Erickson explains, to make decisions that stray from the blacks and whites of rigid, written guidelines into the grays of judgment calls.

“I don’t think people have the courage anymore to stand up and say: ‘That’s wrong, that’s right, what is the matter with you?’ ” she continues. “We lack courage to make our own decisions because then we will be accountable. We want somebody else to be the grown up.

“It has even become acceptable not to be the grown up, to not be accountable . . . and that teaches kids they don’t have to be accountable.”

Even an informal review of common sense, plain dealing and honest thinking, typically involves rounding up the usual suspects. The psychiatrist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the child welfare expert, Dear Abby and Dr. Ruth.

This survey searched for rhyme and reason from earthier thinkers. Such as radio and television columnist Charles Osgood, a down-home dispenser of wry reason for CBS.

He believes part of the problem is rooted deep in mindless regulations accepted by an unthinking majority. We want it spelled out. Right and wrong has been replaced by legal and illegal. Just maybe, it started with baseball.

“If somebody is supposed to have covered second base, and you see nobody covering but throw the ball to the base . . . the error is on the person who was supposed to be there, not on you,” Osgood says. “Runs are going to score, and bad things are going to happen to your team, but you don’t care because it is not your error.

“All you care about is: ‘Don’t look at me. I’m not the one who violated regulations. Rewrite the regulations. But don’t look at me.’ ”

Thomas Paine published pamphlets on common sense as it applied to the Colonists’ cause. Voltaire noted that common sense is not so common. And Philip Howard wrote the book on common sense. Literally.

In “The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America” (Random House, 1995), Howard blames governments and public agencies from DMVs to OSHA for a lunatic expansion of laws neutering and precluding reasonable judgment by reasoning individuals.

Howard, a New York lawyer, blames parents who follow the Gospel According to Willie Sutton and sue because that’s where the money is.

And lawyers more interested in billings than balanced process, who dig into crannies of the law and represent those who would never cry over spilled milk but will certainly sue over hot coffee.

And judges who, complains Howard, “act as referees, not judges . . . who have lost the idea that they have the power to define what is reasonable.”

Consider a recent Boston case where one mother filed to keep another mother’s 3-year-old from a neighborhood sandbox.

The judge, Howard says, could have advised self-help.

“Like leaving the sandbox,” he suggests. “Or getting on with your life. Most absurd is that the judge gave the injunction instead of saying: ‘This is baloney and you demean the court by bringing this. Solve it yourself.’ ”

*

Washington correspondent Margaret Carlson covered the issue of playground public enemies for Time magazine. Her culprits include academics and their paranoia over lawsuits, and parents not trusting teachers to do the right thing by their children.

“Let [teachers] decide if Midol or Advil is something you should be taking, or is it a slippery slope to Valium and hell,” she suggests. “I say: Go back and look at how the nuns ran schools, and then just let the teachers be.”

Did Carlson attend parochial school?

“I did,” she says.

Tony Auth deals with irony and paradox, nonsense and common sense, as a syndicated editorial cartoonist with the Philadelphia Inquirer. Surprisingly, he is unconcerned by regulatory over-think and believes the nation will right itself “because we’re the kind of society where you sort of lurch from extreme to extreme in trying to deal with situations.”

As we lurched from Newt Gingrich to the resuscitation of President Clinton. As we have lurched from begging for air bags to pleading for ways to deflate their dangers.

Now Auth sees us lurching away from political correctness and back to colon-collapsing red meat, lung-tarring Cuban coronas, 160 mph motorcycles that break our buns, and 8 mpg off-road vehicles that never travel off-road.

All of which, notes Auth, may be our rebellion against being told what to do, how to live, who we should be.

*

Author James Finn Garner has built a career on throwing cherry bombs at political correctness. He revises Aesop, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen in “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” (Macmillan, 1994) with his kindness-impaired witches and princesses opposing the male power structure.

In seriousness, he says, PC has submerged personal opinions and erased energy from healthy discussions and disagreement.

“We can’t even agree to disagree anymore,” he says. “We have to be all on the same page and all in consensus or else we’re very bad people. The ability to disagree with somebody, but still respect them . . . that’s not something we’re taught anymore.”

And in our desires to perform acceptably, he says, in the rush to pursue rules and correctness, we have gone beyond taking ourselves too seriously.

“Now we’re taking ourself so self-righteously that nothing is innocent anymore,” he adds. “Even a little peck on the cheek for a 6-year-old. It’s a loss of softness, joy and innocence.”

In this quick quest to measure the current state of sense and sensibilities, calls were made to self-made billionaire businessman Robert Petersen, actor Craig T. Nelson, humor columnist and sitcom inspiration Dave Barry, and another fun guy, retired Gen. Colin Powell.

In what some might see as an encouraging, blinding display of common sense, all declined to talk to the media.

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Name: Erica Taylor

Age: 13

Violated school’s “zero tolerance” drug laws by borrowing a Midol tablet from a classmate. Suspended for nine days, with drug counseling.

Name: Ryan Hudson

Age: 5

Borrowed Mom’s beeper and turned a pumpkin patch field trip into show and tell. Suspended for three days.

Name: Charlotte Kirk

Age: 11

Packed steak knife in her lunch pail for cutting up chicken leftovers. Suspended for a week, placed on two months’ probation.

Name: Johnathan Prevette

Age: 6

Kissed a classmate on the cheek. Suspended for a day, missed a coloring class and an ice cream party, written up for sexual harassment.