Introspection. How Novel
Mr. Tepper, who is 77 years old, and Mr. Evans, who turns 63 in a few days, both searched within themselves not very long for solutions. Unsurprisingly, they found them. Self-reliance is the point. Self-reliance is a character trait that has been in retreat for decades across America. During their self-introspection, nary a couch in sight the gentlemen did not uncover clues that led them into meritorious lives because they were born of terrific parents. Both grew up in broken homes, a precise euphemism that once suggested abnormality had supplanted custom. These days, broken homes is deemed too incivil to be uttered by rap artists and other modern ladies and gentlemen of more refined tastes. In truth, divorce became normative. I am not sure my children, in their teens, 20s and 30s, who also came from a broken home, even know the phrase.
Is Bent Home Preferable?
Some surveys show more than half of contemporary children grow up with a single parent. How, asked the self-appointed arbiters of taste, can you say that most American children are raised in broken homes? Such a label, they ordained, would be injurious to a childs fragile self-esteem. The self-appointed arbiters of taste resolved the conundrum by utilizing a formula their politically liberal teachers taught them. Ignore it. The conundrum may not go away, but it does not have to be acknowledged.
How They Started
In his early 50s, a few years after he had been on the streets, Mr. Evans developed one of the most unusual, and worthy, companies in the United States. He created a bus line that carries mostly poor families to distant points in California to visit relatives and friends who are doing time in state prisons. Mr. Teppers challenges began much earlier. As a kid, a little kid, he lived at various times in foster homes, with his grandmother, and then with his mother, who died when he was 8 years old. This morning at breakfast, when he was recounting his busy working years as an adolescent, I lost track of the number of jobs he found before he was 15 years old. Years later, he carved a business that has served Los Angeles for the past 55 years. Here is a footnote for skeptics who regard religious conversion as too facile of an explanation for reclaiming a life adrift: Religion played a role only in one of the two case studies. Without elaborate, sophisticated psychological apparatus in sight, Mr. Evans and Mr. Tepper found redemption the old-fashioned way. In one case, the kid was poor and driven. In the other, a fully mature man, propelled by his religious commitment, felt a need to make a stronger contributory statement to his community. How do you explain those esoteric concepts to a child? Mr. Tepper and Mr. Evans reached deep within themselves. They pulled out the value of self-reliance, repeating the lessons learned from their teachers and from history.
