(LETTERS) Common sense in government?; Don’t crowd out business

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Dear Casper,

It is shocking to me that the now dominant Freedom Caucus in the Wyoming-legislature is espousing government by “common sense” because nothing could be so clearly wrong as common sense. Common sense is the exact opposite of what actually made America great: Science.

Common sense did not cure my throat cancer. Cancer treatment defies common sense. Common sense says, if somebody is sick, don’t fill their veins with poison and shoot them with almost enough radiation to kill a healthy person. But that’s what the doctors do. The word for that is counterintuitive. It goes against intuition, it feels wrong, and it defies common sense. But. I don’t think there are many people reading this who would get diagnosed with cancer, and tell the doctors, “No thanks on the therapy, I will stick with common sense.”

Does common sense tell you to dig a deep hole in dry ground to find water? Does common sense tell you that most diseases are caused by little animals too small to see, but you can kill them with mold? Does common sense tell you that if you see the ocean rapidly moving away from the shore to run for high ground because a tidal wave is coming?

We did not win WWII by dropping common sense on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We dropped a trillion dollars worth of science. We didn’t sink Nazi submarines with common sense, we invented SONAR. We didn’t kill enemy soldiers hiding in caves with common sense; we invented napalm and flamethrowers.

The United States did not take over this land from previous inhabitants by common sense. It was guns, trains and manufacturing. It was agricultural science that enabled feeding a much bigger population of people, per acre of land, than the Natives could even imagine. There would have been no gold rushes without mining technology. The novel “Moby Dick” spends 300 pages detailing all the science and technology that made the whaling industry possible.

Common sense did not send Columbus sailing for the horizon of a flat planet, nor did it land astronauts on the moon and bring them back alive. Both of those accomplishments took more different kinds of science and technology than I can count. Common sense did not send the Voyager spacecrafts out of this solar system, and still going. Common sense said, “If man were meant to fly, he’d have wings.”

Common sense was burning people at the stake for the heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the other way around, as late as 1600. Any idiot with a lick of common sense can clearly see that the Sun revolves around the Earth every single day.

Common sense tells you that you are sitting still in a chair reading this webpage, when in fact, you are zooming through space at almost 2 million miles an hour. But I guess if the state legislature says, “You are sitting still!” and the courts say that the Sun revolving around the galaxy is unconstitutional because the founders didn’t believe that to be true, then we are all sitting still.

Gina Douglas
Casper

Dear Casper,

I understand the idea of not letting outsiders in to start a business here. But at the same time, you don’t get to complain that the only new businesses are OTB and vape shops. That’s what business owners here know and that’s what they are going to do. Let others in.

I promise, they are not here to turn Casper into some liberal sanctuary, regardless of what your neighbor told you.

Justin Hudson
Casper