The past year has been a financial horror show. Investments have lost value and workers have lost jobs. You and I and our children will pay for the hundreds of billions it will take to rebuild the economy.
This last year has cost us all in material wealth. The gross national product has declined. But that is not the whole story.
Forty years ago Robert Kennedy spoke about our values. What he said then is true today:
"For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman's rifles and Speck's knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate for the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."
Twenty years earlier, in 1948, Rufus Matthew Jones, a teacher at Haverford College, wrote a speech inviting his listeners to "a new installment of heroic spirit." It is time again for that heroic spirit.
