In “Walden,” Henry Thoreah wrote,”One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon,”

Scanning the news pages this week, it might be even more difficult to find good sense than it was in Thoreau’s time.

Let’s start close to home. At NIU early last Friday morning – a little more than 24 hours before a nationally televised non-conference game at the University of Michigan – a couple of football players were involved in a fight at a fraternity.

The Star reported Wednesday that they didn’t start it, and the whole altercation began when someone at a party, entirely unprovoked, smashed a bottle over the head of one player.

If ever there were a reason to fight, that would be it. A man has to protect himself.

But the question isn’t really whether or not the players should have been in the altercation, but what they were doing at the party in the first place.

Good sense would tell you players shouldn’t be at a party two nights before a game with huge implications for the program’s image, a game where some upper-classmen might get a rare chance to show the national media they deserve a shot to play on Sundays.

Just being there created a risk. It’s a credit to Coach Joe Novak and the rest of the team they didn’t let it become a distraction, and they gave Michigan a heckuva’ game.

But perhaps we can forgive the conduct of these players; they are young men who I hope learned a hard lesson.

The lack of good sense shown recently by our federal government is less forgivable.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Consider the men who hold the top three positions in the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Good sense would tell you they should have extensive emergency response qualifications.

But as reported in the New York Daily News, FEMA Director Michael Brown ran horse shows in his last private-sector job.

The No. 2 man, deputy director and chief of staff Patrick Rhode, helped out with the Bush-Cheney campaign.

And the former No. 3, Scott Morris, was a PR expert. This might be the only solid choice – certainly the agency will need a good PR man after Katrina.

Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) has criticized the Bush administration for transforming FEMA from “a professional, world-class emergency responder into a dumping ground for former campaign staff and political hacks.”

Then there’s the sad case of Barbara Bush.

After seeing the thousands of New Orleans refugees living in Houston’s Astrodome, the former first lady told reporters she found it “scary” that so many wanted to stay in Texas. “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she went on to add, “so this is working very well for them.”

Good sense might have told her that as luxurious as sharing a patch of Astroturf with 15,000 other displaced people might seem, there’s a good chance that being in a strange new place, losing everything they owned and not knowing the fates of loved ones is hardly “working very well” for anyone, no matter how “underprivileged.”

Given the lack of good sense we’ve seen in the past week, it’s hard not to agree with what Josephine Demott Robinson, a circus performer, wrote in 1926: “Horses and children, I often think, have a lot of the good sense there is in the world.”

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.