V is for Values

When I was growing up in Binghamton, NY in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Robert Hall was THE place to go for back-to-school clothing. The clothing was inexpensive but solidly made, the kind of place a working-class family wanted to shop for their children’s apparel.

The secret of the stores’ success was told in this 1949 TIME magazine article. But what sold me were the nifty ads, sometimes with the lyrics slightly altered, which you may be able to hear here and/or here.

But the more pervasive meaning of the word “values” involves the “set of emotional rules people follow to help make the right decisions in life.” Or the wrong ones, I suppose. In a large country such as the Unites States, not to mention a vast planet, one hopes for commonality in values, but certainly cannot expect unanimity.

Yet some groups have successfully seemed to have hijacked the term “values”. There is a group of “values voters”, for instance, who are in the right wing of American politics. Based on their recent summit, they are concerned about the “silenced” Christians, the evil of “Obamacare” (health care), “defending marriage”, and in general, the “vast left wing conspiracy.”

While I support differing points of view, I’m troubled by the notion that only those people of a particular political persuasion are the only ones with “values”. It’s similar to the notion that “Christian” only represents a certain political POV.