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By Root 679 0

the time. In Italy, they have an awful time getting any money for the government, because many people just plain don’t pay their income tax. Here the Internal Revenue Service makes some gestures toward enforcing the law, but mostly they just have to trust that we’ll pay what we owe. There has often been talk of a tax revolt in this country, most recently among unemployed auto workers in Michigan, and our government pretty much admits if there was a widespread tax revolt here, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

We do what we say we’ll do; we show up when we say we’ll show up; we deliver when we say we’ll deliver; and we pay when we say we’ll pay. We trust each other in these matters, and when we don’t do what we’ve promised, it’s a deviation from the normal. It happens often that we don’t act in good faith and in a trustworthy manner, but we still consider it unusual, and we’re angry or disappointed with the person or organization that violates the trust we have in them. (I’m looking for something good to say about mankind today.)

I hate to see a story about a bank swindler who has jiggered the books to his own advantage, because I trust banks. I don’t like them, but I trust them. I don’t go in and demand that they show me my money all the time just to make sure they still have it.

It’s the same buying a can of coffee or a quart of milk. You don’t take the coffee home and weigh it to make sure it’s a pound. There isn’t time in life to distrust every person you meet or every company you do business with. I hated the company that started selling beer in eleven-ounce bottles years ago. One of the million things we take on trust is that a beer bottle contains twelve ounces.

It’s interesting to look around and at people and compare their faith or lack of faith in other people with their success or lack of success in life. The patsies, the suckers, the people who always assume everyone else is as honest as they are, make out better in the long run than the

Intelligence 143

people who distrust everyone—and they’re a lot happier even if they get taken once in a while.

I was so proud of myself for stopping for that red light, and inasmuch as no one would ever have known what a good person I was on the road from Harrisburg to Lewisburg, I had to tell someone.

Intelligence

I f you are not the smartest person in the world, you usually find some way to be satisfied most of the time with the brain you’ve got. I was thinking about all this in bed last night because I made a dumb mistake yesterday and I was looking for some way to excuse myself for it so I could go to sleep.

The thing that saves most of us from feeling terrible about our limited intellect is some small part of our personality or character that makes us different. Being uniquely ourselves makes us feel better about not being smart. It’s those little differences we have that keep us from committing suicide when we realize, early in life, that a lot of people have more brains than we have.

There are two kinds of intelligence, too. One can be measured in numbers from tests but the other and better kind of intelligence is something no one has ever been able to measure. The second kind is a sort of understanding of life that some of the people with the most intelligence of the first type, don’t have any of. They may have scored 145 in the I.Q. tests they took in school but they’re idiots out in the real world. This is also a great consolation to those of us who did not score 145 in our I.Q. tests.

It almost seems as though the second type of intelligence comes from somewhere other than the brain. A poet would say it comes from the heart. I’m not a poet and I wouldn’t say that but it does appear as though some of the best decisions we make spring spontaneously to our minds from somewhere else in our bodies.

Enjoying a good laugh with Lesley Stahl, Art Buchwald, and Mike Wallace (hands clasped); note reads: Andy—Straighten up, dammit! Thanks—Mike

How do you otherwise account for love, tears or the quickened heartbeat that comes with fear? All these