The value of honesty

By Patricia Hunt
Published: August 8, 2008

My cell phone company lied to me. I got a call from them (automated, not a real person) stating that they had noticed that I was texting, and I might save money if I were on a different rate plan. The problem is that I have never sent a text message in my life.
I have gotten similar calls from companies that want to lend me money. They, too, claim to have knowledge of my financial situation. Don’t I want to consolidate my credit card debt? Well, no; I don’t have credit card debt. They didn’t know anything about my financial situation. They were lying.
I called the number left me by the automated voice, and I got a kindly soul who looked up my account and confirmed that I do not text. I couldn’t be mad at her. Someone who is probably paid 20 times what she makes sat around dreaming up a sales pitch. Apparently in the advertising industry there are people who think it is effective to pretend to know things about the person you are calling even if the claims are bogus. I told the employee of the phone company that I would love for her to pass along the message, not texted, that I do not appreciate calls that begin with a lie.
I am not naïve enough to think that companies care. They probably have research to prove that lying sells better than telling the truth, and isn’t that really all that matters? That certainly would not be all that mattered to Charlotte and Jim Williams. Charlotte died on Sunday and Jim in 2000. I never knew them, but I have heard about them for years, and not because they hired a PR firm to get the word out. People told me about them because they were extraordinarily kind and generous.
Charlotte started out her adult life as a social worker, but even though her professional life ended after she got married, she really was a social worker all her life, according to her former minister, Kip Caldwell. He told me, “You’ve heard about No Child Left Behind. Charlotte’s attitude was nobody left behind. No child or adult. Nobody at all. She wanted everyone to have a fair shake.” Her children remember her taking food to families who lived in houses with dirt floors.
Jim Williams was “a character.” With a booming voice and salty tongue he was the same in every setting and pretty much incapable of lying. He was a farmer and, according to people who knew him, he had a quick wit coupled with a nose for, well, bull.
This morning I tried to imagine Charlotte and Jim Williams sitting around a conference table with a group of highly paid advertising professionals trying to devise a campaign to sell phone services or loans or whatnots. If someone had suggested that the best way to reach people was to call them by name and imply you have information about them even though you don’t, Jim’s colorful response would have been unprintable in a family paper. Charlotte would have surely worried about the financial well-being of people subjected to manipulative sales techniques.
Charlotte and Jim are gone, but the legacy they leave behind is worth more than any stock portfolio. Our community was richer for the lives they lived among us.
Sandra Anderson Groat, of Greensboro, N.C., is another person of integrity. She adopted a little boy who needed a home when her own children were grown. She built homes for low-income, working-class people in predominately black neighborhoods when most home builders were ignoring them. Until recently, she made a good living at it.
According to “The Business Journal” that serves the Piedmont Triad, Anderson and her two daughters used to “painstakingly qualify each buyer for his or her bank or FHA-backed loan, often working with them a year as the would-be buyers raised their credit scores, paid down their debts and made themselves appealing to cautious lenders. But caution got thrown to the wind several years ago. Why wait on Goat’s prequalification requirements when mortgage brokers were giving away free money, better known as subprime mortgages? No money for a deposit? Too much debt? Lousy job record? No problem.” A man she took on a tour of her housing developments wrote, “She delighted in telling me who lived where; she knew it all by heart.” Sandra Anderson Builders is closing down.
I think just maybe the tide is turning back toward valuing people like Jim and Charlotte Williams and Sandra Anderson. I hope so. People like them constitute the true wealth of any community or country.
Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.