Robert Kennedy
Monday, Mar. 15, 2010-3:32 am
I've been thinking more about life these days, in the light of some recent deaths. I have been trying to be more aware of what is importaint and what is not: such as the shallow consumption of merchandise.
Just by chance, I discovered that it is almost the fortieth anniversary of this speech by Robert F. Kennedy, speaking less than three months before his murder. Kennedy contrasted mere consumption with real wealth. It is one of my favorites:
"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values 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 the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife [RFK is referring to two notorious mass killings of the 1960s]. 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 relationships, the intelligence of our public debate or 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.
One of the big challenges of the twenty-first century for us Americans will be to figure out new ways of measuring our national well-being, beyond traditional yardsticks like Gross Domestic Product. It will be an even greater challenge for business people to figure out how to define success in an era when pushing more stuff out the warehouse door may be an increasingly non-sustainable strategy."
The challenge he talks about has become more, not less, acute over the years. It has it's implications for individual values as well as global ones.
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