Something of Value

In our search for the meaning of life, a sometimes common, if not often frivolous quest, what we could actually be searching for is the meaning of value.  How we sometimes overlook that what we value most in life is what gives meaning to the life we want.

I am reminded of the old movie, “The Yellow Rolls Royce”, made in the mid-sixties, but from which we find even today the meaning of value.  Nothing was more symbolic of ostentatious wealth and prestige as early as the twenties when the story began than owning a Rolls Royce. A wealthy man of high pedigree in the rarefied world of royalty in England bought a brand new yellow Rolls Royce - surely just the latest of a few previous models he had owned - as a wedding anniversary for his dear wife.  It was a most valuable possession in the eyes of many who circled the man’s gravitational field of wealth and power.  But, alas, how quickly the value of the car depreciated when the man caught his wife in a dalliance with a lover in that same yellow Rolls Royce. To him the value of the car plummeted to zero and promptly returned to the dealer. Several thousand odometer miles later an American gangster bought it to please a girlfriend. It lost its value as well later in another romantic twist.  Another American - a woman then living in Europe – bought it on a whim to own one so fancy but which by then had a markedly lesser value as a high mileage used car.  The war came and spread all over Europe.  The Rolls Royce served well the new owner’s noble desire to help in the war effort by ferrying the injured and later to transport underground fighters fighting the Nazis.  I am only telling the story to explain that the value of anything actually changes with time and with people.

Material things do change in value but even when ideas and principles are supposed to remain inviolable, the people who harbor them do change, thus sometimes diminishing the value of those ideals as well. 

Then there is the case of the humble bee.  It might seem a play with words but this is not about the bumble bee; it is about the ordinary honey bee.  Almonds are big business.  Not only is it highly valued among nutritional nutty delights for snacks or beer companion, it is pricey at the grocery stores; but the weakest link in the almond industry is the lowly honey bee.  Without the honey bees to pollinate the almond blooms there will be no almonds. The honey bee and almonds are big business in California.  Commercial bee keepers are in high demand during the season when bees, by the millions are moved from farm to farm, orchard to orchard, depending on the needs of which fruit trees demand the bees’ unrelenting and tireless airy hops-skips from flower to flower.  Suddenly, the ordinary but ubiquitous insect that we take for granted around our flower beds and backyard, have a value so well guarded and cared for that in the off-season, bee keepers spend a lot of money on tons of sugar to keep these bees fed in winter or when there are not enough flowers to pollinate. A bee colony could be anywhere from seventy to a hundred thousand bees and some of the big bee keepers maintain a thousand or more colonies. Far from the glamor of the Rolls Royce and the Maserati these bees have something of value, beyond what we ordinarily see.

 

The lesson here is that by taking control of these bee colonies, because after all they have become a captive organism – trucked in 18 wheelers from county to county in hours of driving distances – we took something from these bees.  So we must, personified by the bee keepers among us, give something of value back to the bees.  In times of their needs and because we want their population to remain robust in the off season we give them sugar – something of value, back.

That brings me to the theme of another movie, “Something of Value”, ca 1957, set in Kenya about colonizers and the colonized. A quote from that story summarized what the characters grappled with when one white man said of the people of Kenya, "we steal their earth and their religion, we've got to give them something of value instead".  This story - thankfully it is now from past history and hopefully never to be repeated again - was refrained many times before from the colonization of early Europe to North and South America and to many parts of Asia.  Over all we can say that something of value was offered and taken.  The Renaissance, the spread of knowledge, medicine, technology and the industrial revolution have been values brought and expanded.  However, the value of a national character and culture destroyed later were impossible to replace, or have been altered beyond recognition. 

Is it justifiable then that in the larger picture, civilization - the continued development and improvement of the human experience – is made possible by replacing old and existing values with new ones?  Is it not that superstition and old practices of quackery in healing were better replaced with modern thought and better health care practices?  I guess it can be said that there were times indeed that when we took away something and replaced it with something of value, humanity was well served.  Unfortunately, and this is where we find conflict and disagreement, the group of people from whom something of value is taken away, the loss has taken so much more pain and anguish than can ever be had in return from what had replaced it. 

In our individual personal stories, something of value is all in the eyes of the beholder.  In Cuba today, a 1957 Bel Air Chevrolet is still a very valued car, sans radio, air conditioning and a GPS Navigator.  Just 90 miles from its shore, in the U.S., there is something of more value in the sweet smell of new leather upholstery with all the bells and whistle of a 2015 2-door sporty vehicle, or that of a brand new 8-cylinder SUV. They are to replace a three year old model, still shiny with its original horsepower undiminished by an under-twenty-thousand-mile reading in its odometer but which by now had already lost its luster in the mind of its restless owner.

Is it going to be a better world if we begin to understand that the meaning of our individual lives is defined by something that does not lose its value no matter what circumstances befall us?  You fill in the other examples of something of value and let me begin with the “value of the contents of our character”.  And you follow with, “…”