David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s News Hour on Friday nights, gave a wonderful presentation in Fresno on May 10th. He was promoting his new book called “The Road to Character” which identifies two different value systems. One he calls “resume” values (i.e., values that define professional success in this society,) and the other, “eulogy” values: the things people say about you after you are dead and define you as a good person.
“The argument in the book,” he told
Fresno Bee reporter Tim Sheehan, “is that we spend a lot of time, especially in
our educational system, on (developing) the resume virtues and not enough time
on the eulogy (virtues) – are you a good person? – even though we know those
are more important.” He believes that
“We’ve become a country that’s just really pleased with itself,” having become
“a more narcissistic culture,” “over-politicized and under-moralized,” over the
past half century.
With the current level of political
debate at the national level, it’s just a darned good time to be thinking about
these distinctions. The gap between
these two values systems is where we find ourselves caught in this country. When Donald Trump confided at the microphone
that he was kinda hoping for the housing mortgage bubble to burst ‘way back in
2008, and then defended himself when
Democrats seized on that little revelation with “Hey, what am I supposed to do?
I’m a businessman!” – he was trying to straddle that gap. The fact that he normally stands with both
feet on the businessman side apparently is still lost on his supporters.
Or not. There are those who still
believe that whatever is good for business is good for the country, that
whatever trickles down is better than nothing, I guess.
I believe in trickle up, which is
always harder to defend, especially when resume values hold sway or are touted
as the only ones that matter. If we didn’t
have to keep writing eulogies, we might forget the other system entirely. But thankfully we do.
David Brooks may have been caught in
that values gap recently when he wrote a story for the New York Times
(republished May 19th in the Bee) on the philanthropic contributions
to the small Westside community of Lost Hills by land and water tycoons Lynda
and Stewart Resnick of Paramount fame.
The Resnicks, both noticeably aging in the 2013 photo of them attending
a community forum in that town, may be developing their own set of eulogy values
for their bucket list. (It should be
noted that what they’re giving is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak: an
infinitesimal percentage of their net worth.)
Brooks’ literary portrait of those contributions was sweet. I hope it encourages the Resnicks to double
or even triple their efforts.
But there is no way to offset the
damage done to Lost Hills and myriad other Central Valley towns by the
structure of political power and economic control created when one entity owns
too much land. You cannot offset the
jobs lost in packinghouses from the plant closures and mechanization by
Paramount (oops, sorry: Wonderful, Inc.)
You cannot offset the farming opportunities lost in citrus or nuts like
pistachios and almonds; you can’t bring back the small pomegranate farmers they
decimated several years ago when they thawed the frozen juice they’d been
hoarding. You can’t bring back the
downtowns they destroyed when they sold off those communities’ water to
southern California or pumped down the aquifers. No amount of financial aid can offset the
socio-political and economic damages inflicted by giant landholdings on
communities.
The Resnics do not now, and probably
never will wear Haloes, no matter how many dollars they drop on Lost Hills or
how many other communities they attempt to rescue. Like Donald Trump, they have one foot on each
side of the resume/eulogy values gap, and when push comes to shove or some
opportunity raises its snaky head, we’ll find them with both feet on the resume
values side, not even blinking.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy
Wischemann is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good
with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.
Thanks to Michele Hester and Mark Arax for their comments this
week. You can send your thoughts on
rural philanthropy c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
No comments:
Post a Comment