A message that is more often honored in the abstract than in the real world.
Which is why people admire philanthropists - the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords, and, more recently, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. There also are local names long associated with giving to good causes: Eccles, Wallace, Browning, Tanner, and, more recently, among others, Skaggs, Wagner, Bradshaw, Price, Gore, Simmons, Sorenson, Dee and McCarthey.
And Huntsman. The news that Huntsman Chemical Corp. has been sold, and that Jon Huntsman Sr. will use $600 million of the proceeds to endow his foundations and their good works, particularly cancer research, is what causes us to reflect on philanthropy today and add our thanks, as we're sure much of the community will be doing, to Jon and Karen Huntsman.
We don't want to wax philosophical here, but we can say with some certainty that Jon Huntsman has been a visionary at least twice in his life. Once was when he saw and seized the opportunity to found his chemical company. The second was when he saw the confluence of Mormon genealogical research and the study of the genetic attributes of some cancers, and founded the Huntsman Cancer Institute to explore them.
The Huntsman family benefited financially from that first vision, but so have many other Utahns and people around the world. And that first vision made the funding of the second vision, the Huntsman Cancer Institute, possible. There have been other Huntsman charities that have benefited as well.
Call it sharing the wealth, call it giving back, call it love of your fellow man and woman. Call it what you will, it is usually the result of someone with a talent for creating wealth who also has the decency or self-knowledge to realize that it is a talent, maybe a God-given one, like making music or writing poetry, and that the wealth created is meant to be shared.
Some people who make great wealth come to that understanding. Others don't. If more did, philanthropy would not be remarkable.
But it is. And what Jon and Karen Huntsman have done is remarkable. And for that, we thank them.
