Now, What Was the Question?
By John Eagleton | A Five-Minute Commentary
I heard something today that made me laugh.
Somebody said, “The answer to this problem is money.”
And I thought, well, hell, isn’t that the answer to every problem?
We need better schools? Money.
We need better healthcare? Money.
We need to fix our roads? Money.
We need to solve homelessness? Money.
We need to fix Washington?
Oh, Jesus Christ. We’re going to need a LOT of money.
And that’s when something occurred to me.
What if money isn’t the answer? What if our obsession with money is part of the problem?
Think about that for a minute.
We’ve created the wealthiest civilization in human history. We have technology that would have been considered magic a hundred years ago. We can send spacecraft billions of miles into the universe. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the planet.
We have artificial intelligence that can write poetry, diagnose diseases, and help design entire cities.
And yet we still have people sleeping on sidewalks.
Children going to school hungry.
Families choosing between buying groceries and paying for prescription drugs.
And young people who work forty hours a week but can’t afford an apartment.
How the hell does that make sense?
We’re not living in a world without resources.
We’re living in a world that hasn’t figured out how to use its resources wisely.
And I think there’s a fundamental difference.
Money is a resource. Wisdom is knowing what to do with it.
Let me give you an example.
Suppose a city has a homelessness problem.
The traditional response is to form a committee.
The committee hires consultants.
The consultants conduct a study.
The study recommends another study.
Three years later, we’ve spent two million dollars, and the homeless people are still sleeping outside.
But we’ve got one hell of a PowerPoint presentation!
Now imagine approaching the problem differently.
What if we started by talking to the people experiencing homelessness?
What if we asked them what happened?
Was it a lost job? A medical emergency? Mental illness? Addiction? A family breakdown? An unaffordable apartment?
Because those are different problems requiring different solutions.
Some people need housing.
Some need healthcare.
Some need mental health treatment.
Some need employment opportunities.
And some need somebody to give a damn.
Money can help provide those things.
But money alone can’t tell us which ones are needed.
That requires listening.
That requires understanding.
That requires something government doesn’t always seem particularly interested in.
Curiosity.
And that brings me to something I’ve been doing here in Greensboro, North Carolina.
I’ve been going out into the community and interviewing strangers.
Not politicians. Not consultants. Not people with fancy titles.
Just ordinary human beings.
Young people. Older people. Students. Workers. Artists. Entrepreneurs. People from every imaginable background.
And I’m asking them simple questions.
What do you like about Greensboro?
What don’t you like?
What would you change?
And what do you imagine this city looking like ten years from now?
You know what’s fascinating?
Nobody has ever asked me how much money I’m going to give them for answering.
They’re happy somebody is interested in what they think.
Some of these conversations last an hour.
An hour!
Two complete strangers, sitting together, talking about life, their hopes, their frustrations, and their dreams.
And the cost?
Absolutely nothing.
Well, occasionally a cup of coffee.
Apparently, democracy runs on caffeine.
But here’s what I’ve discovered.
People have ideas.
Really good ideas.
And they’re sitting out there, waiting for somebody to ask.
We spend millions of dollars trying to figure out what people want.
Have we considered just asking them?
Now, I’m not suggesting money is unimportant.
Of course it is.
You can’t build a hospital with good intentions.
You can’t pay teachers with inspirational speeches.
And you certainly can’t repair a sewer system with positive thinking.
Although I’m pretty sure somebody in Washington has proposed it.
Money matters.
But here’s the distinction.
Money should be the fuel, not the destination.
Somewhere along the way, we started measuring success by how much money we accumulated rather than what we accomplished with it.
We celebrate billionaires simply because they’re billionaires.
Think about how strange that is.
If somebody accumulates ten billion dollars, we call them extraordinarily successful.
But if somebody spends thirty years teaching children, inspiring thousands of young minds, and changing lives, we give them a retirement plaque and a sheet cake.
And if they’re lucky, the school district pays for the cake.
What exactly are we measuring?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
For much of my life, like most people, I worried about money.
Making it. Saving it. Investing it. Protecting it.
And recently, something changed.
I began to recognize that some of the most extraordinary experiences of my life weren’t things I purchased.
They were things I participated in.
Conversations with strangers.
Unexpected friendships.
Creative discoveries.
Watching somebody’s face light up when they realize their opinion matters.
You can’t put a price on those experiences.
And believe me, I’ve tried.
I’m a businessman. I spent forty-two years in business.
My first instinct is to ask, “What’s the return on investment?”
Well, I’ve finally discovered an investment with an extraordinary return.
Invest in another human being.
The initial investment might be nothing more than your time.
And the return can last a lifetime.
Now imagine applying that philosophy to government.
Instead of asking how much money we can spend, what if we first asked what kind of community we want to create?
What if Greensboro decided that ten years from now, we wanted to be the most welcoming, creative, innovative, and compassionate city in America?
What if we decided no one should have to sleep on our streets?
What if we built a downtown where people actually wanted to spend time?
What if we made public transportation something people enjoyed using?
What if our schools became places where teachers were celebrated and students were inspired?
What if we became a city known throughout the country for bringing people together rather than dividing them?
Would those things require money?
Absolutely.
But they would require something else first.
A shared vision.
Because without a vision, money simply allows us to make the same mistakes on a larger scale.
And that’s what concerns me about government today.
We argue endlessly about budgets.
Republicans want to spend money on one thing.
Democrats want to spend money on something else.
Everybody argues about taxes.
Everybody argues about deficits.
Everybody argues about who’s going to pay.
But how often do we stop and ask the most important question?
What are we actually trying to accomplish?
Not next Tuesday.
Not in the next election.
Ten years from now.
Twenty years from now.
What kind of society are we trying to build?
Because if we can agree on the destination, we can start figuring out how to get there.
And maybe we’ll discover that some of our biggest problems don’t require nearly as much money as we thought.
Maybe they require cooperation.
Maybe they require imagination.
Maybe they require courage.
Maybe they require us to stop treating every disagreement as a declaration of war.
And maybe, just maybe, they require us to recognize that the person sitting across from us isn’t an obstacle.
They’re a potential partner.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about what makes a meaningful life.
And I’ve come to a fairly simple conclusion.
It’s not how much money you accumulate.
It’s not how many possessions you own.
It’s not how important your title sounds.
It’s what you contribute.
It’s the relationships you build.
It’s the lives you touch.
And it’s whether you leave the world a little better than you found it.
So the next time somebody tells me, “The answer to this problem is money,” I’m going to smile.
And I’m going to ask them a question.
“Before we talk about money, can we talk about the problem?”
Because maybe we don’t need another checkbook.
Maybe we need another conversation.
Maybe we don’t need another committee.
Maybe we need a little curiosity.
And maybe we don’t need to be the richest society in the history of the world.
Maybe we need to become the wisest.
Now, wouldn’t THAT be something worth investing in?
I’m John Eagleton, and I believe the greatest resource any community possesses isn’t its money.
It’s its people.
And it’s about damn time we started investing in them.
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