David Brooks: How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society
I just read this David Brooks piece from the Jan. 25 New York Times that my mom recommended.
There is no doubt that, if we read more and consumed more culture of all types, we’d all be better people, and our society would be capable of greater compassion, humility, nuanced thinking, and better problem-solving.
Yet how we’re going to get there from here is another matter. As Brooks points out, the last few decades has only seen the accelerated trend in our colleges from liberal arts to curricula that we deem of more practical use in terms of preparing us for lucrative careers, e.g., business and technology.
FWIW, I’m delighted to have a mother who, though a lifelong Republican, eagerly reads op-eds in what are largely regarded as the distinctly left-of-center media. The probability to have a mother who’s totally lucid at 97 is perhaps 1 in 100; the probability that such a person has real grit in terms of both her thinking and her integrity at that age is improbably small.
Talk about gratitude.
No offence to your Mom – but are you kidding?
Your mom is a MAGA / Trump supporter – if what you have been printing is correct.
And having a 97 year old being lucid, with “grit” as you put it, and “integrity” — is a human quality – not something to be “measured”.
You either have it or you don’t – and your confusing integrity with a “belief”.
She lost her “integrity” Craig when she became a MAGA Trump follower — because Trump has no integrity or “grit” – just an animal sense of self-centered survival.
Being a true “Conservative” – of any amount – is perfectly OK: because it has both “integrity”and a “foundation”.
MAGA Trump followers have neither.
I need to clarify that my mom is not a Trump supporter, though she is a lifelong conservative Republican.