Good Friday Morning! Continued from yesterday.
1. Question – What is the secret to the
Rosetan’s longevity?
2. Thought – It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn
and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why.
They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another,
stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking
for one another in their backyards. They learned about the
extended family clans that underlay the town’s
social structure. They saw how many homes had three
generations living under one roof, and how much respect
grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of
Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of
the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations
in a town of just over 2000 people. They picked up on the
egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the
wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the
unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to
the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had
created a powerful, protective social structure capable of
insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.
The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from,
because of the world they had created for themselves in
their tiny little town in the hills.
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the
medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism
they faced. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at
the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were
– that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions
we made – on what we chose to eat, and how much we
chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by
the medical system. No one was used to thinking about
health in terms of community.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment
to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new
way: they had to get them to realize that they
wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was
healthy if all they did was think about an
individual’s personal choices or actions in
isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They
had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and
who their friends and family were, and what town their
families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that
the values of the world we inhibit and the people we
surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we
are. (Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell)
“We are under a Constitution, but the
Constitution is what the judges say it is.”
(Charles Evans Hughes)
Have a great weekend! Spring around the corner. No texting
and driving. Exercise and drink water. Be good – Do
good!