This may seem at first like a trivial topic, but I assure you that I am driving toward a larger point.

I grew up on Maine’s Blue Hill peninsula, where, to paraphrase Richard Hooker, author of the M*A*S*H books (long before the TV series), it’s often quicker to get into a car and drive four miles than to make a phone call. It was true then and it’s true now, given the sometimes spotty cell phone reception. The area is a panorama of seascapes, blueberry fields, trees, and small towns and the meandering roads that connect them. The main roads have route numbers, but most people know them by their local names: South Street, the Mines Road, Penobscot Flats.

Because it’s impossible to drive very far in a straight line without running into the ocean, the roads don’t run straight, either. They overlap and combine. Route 172 in Blue Hill is also route 15 and 175. Different roads going different places, they join for a short time.

I learned to drive on those roads. Even after years away, and more years of trying to live as free from cars as possible, I know where all the curves are, when to downshift on each hill. I know which views to stop for. And I know which direction I’m going.

But one year the editor of the local newspaper, a political conservative who will go unnamed here, seized on some of the road signs in the area as prime examples of government ineptitude. To wit: in parts of Blue Hill, drivers could find themselves simultaneously traveling on route 172 south and 175 north. How, this editor asked, could one be going north and south at the same time? It didn’t make sense. 

It must have been a slow season for both news and political activism, because the editor didn’t stop with bellyaching in a small-town newspaper. He contacted state representatives and made such a fuss about it that the signs were changed. And that’s why today, if you’re in South Blue Hill, North Brooklin, or Sedgwick, you can drive the same route both northbound and southbound without turning around, and some of the signs are missing directions entirely.

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There was nothing wrong with the signs. One route trends south along its entire length while another trends north. Examples abound all over Maine, including other parts of the peninsula. U.S. route 1 runs from Fort Kent south to Key West, while Maine route 15 runs from Stonington north to Jackman. When you are driving from Blue Hill to Bangor via Bucksport, for a few miles you are on both south route 1 and north route 15. Obviously, you aren’t going north and south at the same time. But that’s the purportedly “common sense” reasoning our late local editor used to poke at the state government, and to get the signs changed.

Conservatives are fond of appealing to this colloquial idea of common sense. Another name for it is “folk wisdom.” But in reality, the folk aren’t all that wise, sense isn’t all that common, and widely shared beliefs aren’t necessarily sensible. 

Over the centuries between Aristotle and Galileo, it was generally held that heavier objects would fall faster than light ones. A rock falls faster than a feather, doesn’t it? We now know that an object’s weight has nothing to do with how fast it falls, but one might have been ridiculed in the streets of imperial Rome or medieval Brussels for proposing such an outlandish idea. Suggest that Earth orbits the sun and not vice versa, and you could have been arrested.

But it’s common sense that the sun circles the earth, isn’t it? Anyone can see that it comes up on one side of the sky and goes down on the other. Just as anyone can see that the answer to car congestion is more cars, the answer to gun violence is more guns, and the answer to poverty is to make the rich richer.

I’ve been seeing this one a lot: some variation on the theme that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from a police officer. That may be true for a graying Caucasian male pulled over for speeding on the Blue Hill peninsula, but it isn’t true for a lot of people in a lot of places in these United States. The assumption of the argument – that police always behave honorably – is unfortunately disproven by history, recent and otherwise. 

The continued resistance to ranked-choice voting as “too complicated” has the same ring as the old editor’s crusade against the road signs. Yet it is beyond sensible, and it more accurately reflects the will of the electorate. The old system worked fine, for any fanatical minority that succeeded in splitting its opposition and winning a large enough slice of the vote – enough to impose its will on the rest of us.

Who disabuses us of these common, sometimes trivial, but occasionally dangerous, misconceptions? Usually it’s people with curiosity, education, and the opportunity to pursue either or both. The experts, in other words: the scientists, the fact-based professionals, academics, mathematicians, and a few great writers and artists. Most of these people oppose the minority regime in Washington that, for now, seems to have all the power. Common sense says we should listen to them.