"When do you stop being a CEO and start being a grandfather?" . . .

[OneBlueSky]

I just finished reading How Can I Keep From Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger . . . it's an updated (2008) version of a biography by David King Dunaway first published in 1981 . . . the updates include a lot of input from Pete, who also wrote a Foreward . . . among the many gems in the book was this passage, which I thought I'd pass along . . .

A friend of Seeger's, Oren Lyons, of the Onondaga tribe in upstate New York, once attended a World Economic Conference in Switzerland. There he met the CEOs of billion-dollar corporations. "I asked them," said Lyons, "if the realized that the way they were using up the world's resources, in a sense they were headed for a brick wall.

"They said to me: 'Yes, Mr. Lyons, of course we realize that, but you should realize that we have been put in our jobs to make as much money as we can for our stock holders. If we don't do that we're out of a job.'

"I asked, 'Are any of you grandfathers?' And a number of them readily said yes.

"I then asked them, 'When do you stop being a CEO and start being a grandfather?'"

when indeed . . .

[OneBlueSky]

1. another passage that struck me . . .

around 1994 or so, when Pete was comtemplating giving up the limelight for a quieter life (something he did periodically), a friend asked if he could paint a saying on Pete's barn in Beacon . . . Pete said yes, if he didn't like it he could just paint over it . . . here's how he described it . . .

They painted a picture of the Clearwater and mushrooms and flowers. Then these lines: 'I am done with great things and big success and I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular, moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets or like the capillary oozing of water. Yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.' William James.

"I put it on my stationary. This is what's going to save the world," Seeger said. "It's too easy to say there's no hope for this community, let me go somewhere else. I mistrust the mobility of modern times. It's too easy to leave where you are, instead of sticking it out and making the place better."

[Journeyman]

2. I had this same conversation with a printer I worked with for a short while. . .

the State Air Quality Control Board had recently instituted emission reduction standards and he was incensed that they were interfering with his business.

"When will they just leave us alone," he lamented, "so we can do what we need to do, make money?"

"But maybe the AQCB is helping us do what we need to do," I replied. "Maybe what's really important is that we protect the health and safety of our children, that we labor to ensure they inherit a livable world from us, a place where they can raise their children as they see fit, too. After all, a working parents, what are we making all that money for, if not the safety and future of our children."

I found a new printer for my work shortly thereafter. I needed someone to partner with whom I felt had a minimal grasp on what's important.