Money Can Be the Root of Good

I grew up in the ’60s. That doesn’t mean I’m a hippie. But I couldn’t help being affected by some of the things that were going on during that time. All that Bob Dylan music was bound to sink in on some level.

I grew up thinking businessmen were bad. They were likely to drink my wine and plow my earth. Men who wore suits sent teenaged boys to die in Vietnam so they could make more money — somehow. I didn’t really know how that worked, but that was the central belief of a generation of baby boomers who were rebelling against their elders and didn’t want to go to war in a jungle halfway around the world.

My father put on a black suit every morning before he left for the office. He came home unhappy and frequently inebriated. I thought, whatever he did so we could have enough money must be an awful thing, because he was obviously tortured by his daily routine. I didn’t realize until later that my father’s dark journey through life wasn’t caused by his job, but by the alcohol.

During my 20s, the quest for money seemed to me to be the antithesis of the search for spirituality. One did not nurture the other. To the contrary, living for material things seemed to drain the Spirit out of people. To me, men in suits were a symbol of everything that was wrong with America. I believed you could either worship God or money, but not both.

It’s easy to condemn entire segments of society. It’s a self-righteous, defensive thing to do. And that’s what I did in my mind to the generation before mine and to all people who seemed to live the material life.

But occasionally things happen that jolt me back to sanity.

It happened once in 1977 and took two decades to sink in, affecting me a little more profoundly every time I thought about it.

I started college that year, a month after my mother died of bone cancer.

During my first day of classes, I was called to a vice president’s office. He told me my college education would be paid for by an anonymous benefactor if I needed it to be.

At first, I was a embarrassed. Did someone think we were poor? After all, my father was still alive, and I assumed he would help me financially with college. But obviously, somebody was concerned about me.

I didn’t take them up on it. My father did help pay for college until he died the summer before my senior year.

The identity of the person who made this offer remained a secret for almost 20 years, until I mentioned it to Leroy Hoard, the father of a childhood friend of mine from Marianna. He knew all about it. After my mother died, he had asked Bob McGinnis if there was some way to make sure I could go to college.

McGinnis, himself a veteran of the Korean War, was on the Marianna School Board at the time. He has been a state representative since 1979. He’s a farmer, but I’ve never seen him wear anything other than a suit. He didn’t know me, but I had grown up in grade school and Sunday school with his daughter Suzanne.

McGinnis had nothing to gain by making this offer. He couldn’t even write it off on his taxes. It was an act of sheer generosity. A rich man in a suit was extending a hand to a young man who hated rich men in suits. It’s hard to think the world is against you when people do things like that.

A year after this revelation, I was driving through the Delta one Sunday morning and stopped to attend a service at the Methodist Church in Marianna. Bob McGinnis was there.

I approached him as he walked to his car and mumbled “thank you” for offering to pay for my college education.

He was polite and friendly, as if he had known me all his life.

Maybe he thinks it wasn’t that big of a deal because I didn’t take any of his money. Perhaps he has enough money to send orphaned journalists to college without thinking much about it. But in that single act of kindness, he set an example for me to live by. He restored my faith in man, and consequently, in God.

It was a gradual awakening, one that is still underway. But I think about it from time to time, and I realize it was an act of true generosity. Although I’m not in a financial position to do the same for someone else at this point in my life, I’m overwhelmed with the urge to pass that kindness on in other ways. Such things are contagious.

Bob McGinnis taught me that money isn’t evil, that I cannot judge my brothers and that I should love my enemy because he is not my enemy at all.