Answer:  I guess maybe commitment.  For me, a sense of – you know, I’ve been so lucky; I’ve had the opportunity and responsibility to give back, to leave a place better than I found it. 

I think that comes a lot from my family.  I think a lot of people in my family are very oriented toward working in society, or teaching – things where you feel like you can make a difference.

For example, in my family, my dad grew up pretty poor.   He was on welfare.  His mom only spoke Spanish.  And the idea that he had a chance to go to college, to become a professor, to get a Ph.D.  Such a notion that there was a society that offered that chance to somebody who maybe in another place never would have never had that chance.  Maybe as a child I grew up with that story, thinking about that’s the kind of society that allows people to make something.

I think a lot of people I talk to can be very judgmental about a homeless person on the street or people who can’t seem to get work.  And I think in my family there was always the same of “you don’t know what their story is.  You don’t know what has happened to them to bring them to this place.  And it’s more of your job to be compassionate and to try to make a society in which they are not stuck there, just ignored or left.”

So I think that has sort of guided me, and given me a chance to have experiences, to be able to go travel and see other places where it’s very difficult for people to find some kind of opportunity.  I think it was something that was just constantly repeated. 

For example, my mom always had this notion that everybody starts good, but everybody kind of is a child of God.  That everybody has a light within.  She would constantly talk about that.  And so there was always this assumption that it’s our job as a society to let everybody show that, to shine in that way.

When I was growing up, we used to go to church in downtown Sacramento.  There would be homeless people there.  I think that would be an opportunity for my mom – you know, she was always very open in talking with them, would give change or money.  I think it was just a whole attitude that she showed to me about treating everybody like human beings and not ignoring them.

I feel I see a lot of people with that, for example, with homeless people.  Like just ignore them, just treat them like they’re not people.  I feel like a lot of the values that my mom taught me were like that.  Like it’s just every little way that you are in the world that matters.  It’s that you return the shopping cart, or that you would never lie or take something – just in every little way that it has to infuse your whole life.  I have always tried to follow that.  It’s not just a political stand.  It’s every minute. 

A lot of things that come to mind too, for me, are my grandparents, for example.  My grandma always had this value about leaving a place better than you found it.  I know it comes from my grandma, because we would go on road trips, and she would bring cleaning supplies.  And if we went and stopped at a bathroom, she would clean the bathroom before we left that place. 

I feel like with them there were a lot of those kinds of values.  Little things that they taught us – like you have a responsibility to make these better.  I think my grandmother did that in little ways, and I have tried to pick a profession like teaching where I feel like I can do that every day. 

Family Values at Wikipedia
Family values is a political and social concept used in various cultures to describe values that are believed to be traditional in that culture and in support of the idea that families are the basic units of culture. The phrase has different meanings in different cultures. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the term has been frequently used in political debate, especially by social and religious conservatives, who believe that the world has seen a decline in family values since the end of the Second World War. Because the term is vague, and means different things to different people, "family values" has been described as a political buzzword, power word, or code word predominantly used by right-wing or conservative political parties and media providers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_values

More Progressive Values Stories:

Edwin Rutsch
What Are Progressive Values? Documentary Project
http://ProgressiveSpirit.com 
and Study Group

Cross Posted To:
http://democracyforamerica.com/users/261694-whatare-progressive-values/blog_posts/25113

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