President's Message - August 2025
Stewardship & Trust
by - Thomas Twombly
artist - Daisy Lopez
There are some incredibly important investments we all make that have little to do with money. We might exchange money – even a great deal of it at certain times – to facilitate these investments, but the primary object of making them isn’t for a monetary benefit. It’s to reap rewards that are far more valuable than money.
Think about investing time, personal commitment, individual attention, and money into building, maintaining, and renewing close-knit, high-trust relationships. Think about your good friends, close personal connections, long-term colleagues, extended family, your guests at important celebrations, treasured clients, trusted business contacts, valued church and social groups, loyal alumni organizations, and connections in committed charitable entities. Don’t those provide a sense of lasting wealth and well-being that is virtually impossible to “buy” no matter how much money and power you might have?
Close-knit, high-trust relationships make people feel happier, but they also make them more resilient and capable of banding together, coming alongside each other, sharing resources, combining talents, accomplishing great feats, and bouncing back quickly from fearsome setbacks. Our history is replete with inspiring examples of this phenomenon.
Social wealth is priceless. But like all forms of wealth, it must be stewarded – protected, grown, and deployed - wisely and carefully, with an eye towards the greater good.
And this doesn’t just apply to individuals. It applies to countries and nations as well.
And right now, our country, The United States of America, seems to be actively squandering the social wealth – the trust, the cohesion, and the common bonds - that generations of Americans have built since World War II, individually and collectively, with selfless investments of their time, commitment, personal loyalty, and often their very lives.
We are undermining – seemingly on a deliberate and systematic basis – the faith, confidence and trust in our laws, our promises, our traditions, and the storied (if flawed) national institutions that are so critical to underpinning the relationships between each of us as US citizens, and between this nation, our closest neighbors, and our most trusted allies around the globe.
We are being turned against each other by polarizing toxicity, and a sick, self-centered, money-focused obsessiveness that has infected our domestic political world. This threatens our history as a democratic republic, and perhaps our very way of life.
Irrespective of your political preferences or party affiliation, what’s at serious risk right now is generational wealth that is worth protecting. These are priceless multi-generational investments that are worth saving. It’s up to all of us to change this twisted circumstance, and to step up and take our stewardship responsibilities more seriously.
Before you rush to the belief that I’m singling out one political party over another, let me assure you, I am not. I’m calling out both for their self-centeredness, for their breathtaking chicanery, and for their incredible lack of stewardship over the resources of this great nation – especially that ineffable and priceless thing we call “trust.”
There is plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the aisle – Senators and Congresspeople (or their spouses) in both parties trading stocks on inside information that would get regular citizens arrested and would cause those of us at Lucien, Stirling & Gray to lose our licenses – and our dignity. Many pursue lifetime “careers” as politicians - feeding from the public trough and engorging themselves on self-awarded benefits and stunning levels of grift from “dark money” that will never be available to any of their constituents. And all are now forced to swear obvious fealty not to the greater good, not to the wealth and wellbeing of this country as a whole (nor, God forbid, to the Constitution) but to the narrow and twisted self-interests of their particular hyper-partisan tribe. It’s a disgrace.
How can it have come to be that half of our population is branded “good”, while the other half is branded “evil”? How can it have come to be that “E Pluribus Unum” has been twisted into “50.5% reigns supreme”? How can it have come to be that the rabid 15% of political operatives at either of the far ends of the spectrum are allowed to dictate a deeply divisive national narrative, while the 70% of decent, caring, honest, ethical, hard-working American citizens in the middle are forced to pick one side or the other and then go along with extremist, winner-take-all, special interest agendas?
We have all allowed this to exist for too long. Now is the time to come together, to stand fast, and to demand better.
If we fail to do so, we run the risk of watching everything we have ever valued just suddenly slip from our grasp – and no amount of money will ever replace it.
Thank you for your confidence and trust.
Thomas G. Twombly
President