A lesson from First Lady Rosalynn Carter
First Lady Rosalyn Carter. Official White House portrait, 1977
“Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
— David McCullough Jr.
I was hurtling down Interstate 75 between Macon and Valdosta, Georgia, last week in the early morning, cotton fields tabling out on both sides of the road and the horizon a creamsicle orange with cloudy swirls so beautiful it kept pulling my eyes from the road. I was headed to Tampa for an extended weekend visit with close family, excited to spend a few days with my in-laws, nieces, nephews and their significant others and celebrate the coming arrival of a new member to the family.
Taking a break from listening to music, I do what I often do when driving solo on road trips — spin slowly through the radio dial, listening for a few minutes when something comes in to get a taste of the local FM and AM stations and what they are offering.
I found a heavy dose of Christian programing in this rural part of south Georgia, as one might expect, along with several stations airing John Boy and Billy, the southern-fried radio personalities who have been a staple in this part of the world for a few decades now. Some of their stuff is laugh-out-loud funny, other parts just too crude and too right-wing for my liking.
And then I came across two local radio DJs interviewing a close friend of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. At some point on this drive I’d be less than 50 miles from Plains, Georgia, and Rosalynn’s death and funeral just a couple days earlier was big news around the world but was, I’m sure, particularly poignant for those in this area. The Carters took their love for Georgia everywhere they went, always returning home to their little postage stamp of earth no matter where their community service work took them.
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The message that came through about Rosalynn and Jimmy was loud and clear in story after story — dedication to family, the importance of hard work, community service, and doing what one can to make the world a better place for those less fortunate. And doing it without calling attention to oneself — it’s about the work, not the people doing the work.
Carter’s presidency was from 1976-80, my last two years of high school and first two years of college. The press persecuted him for his inexperience and lack of savvy, but he and Rosalynn remained steadfast to their values and never sold out for political expediency. History will judge his presidency, but the Carters’ ethics and character have always been above reproach. Hard to say that about most politicians these days.
There’s no mysterious lesson to be learned from what the Carters symbolize. They were part of that generation we are losing, people who could never wash the bitter taste of the Depression from their mouths, those for whom putting their head down and working their tails off was simply what one did. Successive generations have known how to work, but we have also become a culture that’s much more comfortable in celebrating “me.”
Author and journalist Tom Wolfe described this transformation in his famous 1976 article in New York magazine, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Basically, Wolfe argued that the post-World War II generation became more narcissistic and worried about their own self-actualization. There’s no doubt his conjecture in 1976 proved prescient, and I would argue that this infatuation with trying to “find oneself” has only gotten more prevalent as we move toward the middle of the 21st century. I’m not sure what that means for the future, but, as they say, it is what it is.
The quote I used at the beginning of this column came from my wife when I was telling her and her sister, Betsy, about the radio interview I had heard and we were discussing the Carters. Do a bit of research on McCullough and yes, it is indeed relevant to the ideals the Carters embodied: love your family, do good work, do it for the right reasons, and that’s a good life. Godspeed Mrs. Carter, and thanks for the reminder.
(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
