Looking for Value at 60 Minutes

I know I haven’t written in a while. Part of it: I’ve been busy. The bigger part: it’s hard to find good promotions, services, and offers that actually offer real value to the consumer. You know where these stories are not? The Business Pages. The Business Pages are all about money–making it, losing it, calculating it. Not much there about people, unless a particular people was instrumental in making or losing it.

So where, then, do you find a story about a “good deal”? Well, sometimes I find them on TV shows like CBS Sunday Morning that actually devote time each week to contributions people make to better the world.

Take this past Sunday’s 60 Minutes. Though known for its “hard-hitting” journalism that strikes fear in the hearts of evil-doers, yesterday they had two stories that focused more on the good hearts and potential of humans than on what’s screwed up about them, er, us.

The first: The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?. If it weren’t on 60 Minutes, you’d probably conclude that this story about John Kanzius who may have developed a cure for cancer with pie pans and radio waves was pure quackery. But look for more on the Kanzius Machine from legitimate sources. It all started with a guy who could no longer look into the hollow eyes of cancer-filled children and wanted to at least try to do something.

The second, even more valuable story–El Sistema: Changing Lives Through Music–tells about Venezuala’s concerted attempts to train its children in classical music. In America, where music training is the first program to be cut when budgets get thin, the story in the poverty-stricken Venezuala is quite different

Nearly 300,000 kids like Paola are in “the system.” There are 176 orchestras for children, 216 for young people, and 400 more ensembles, orchestras and choirs. The sound of children playing classical music is everywhere. If it seems they’re playing as if their lives depend on it, Dr. Abreu says they do.

“Eight hundred thousand children have passed through the system in 32 years,” he told Simon.

“The majority of them have not, will not become musicians?” Simon asked.

“Music produces an irreversible transformation in a child. This doesn’t mean he’ll end up as a professional musician. He may become a doctor, or study law, or teach literature. What music gives him remains indelibly part of who he is forever,” Abreu said.

We need more people in the world like Dr. José Antonio Abreu who, with 11 children and deep belief that the spiritual benefits of music could change a nation’s children and who they become as adults, will step out and make it happen.