Roger Marsh: Well, welcome back to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh. You know it's early in the new year, but I pray that so far 2024 is going very well for you and yours. I want you to know that God has you in his hands, and it's our prayer that you open your heart to hear his guidance and wisdom for any problems you might be facing this year. Now, on today's program, we're going to hear part two of a special presentation from Dr. Ben Carson, which was recorded at an event here in Colorado Springs. By the way, if you missed part one, you can visit our website and hear it there at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. That's drjamesdobson.org/familytalk.
Dr. Ben Carson is a best-selling author, academic, and a retired neurosurgeon. During his career in medicine, he served as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children's Center and performed the first separation of conjoined twins back in 1987. Dr. Carson also became involved in politics, serving as the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 until 2021. And of course, there was also a movie made from his autobiography, entitled Gifted Hands. Dr. Carson and his wife, Candy, have three grown sons and several grandchildren. Now let's join Dr. Ben Carson for the conclusion of his presentation right here on Family Talk.
Dr. Ben Carson: One of the things that we have to begin to push is logic and common sense. The logic and common sense will tell you, "Yes, green renewable energy is a good thing." It's a desirable goal, but it's also true that we have a lot of fossil fuels and we've learned how to use them in a clean way. And there's nothing that says you can't pursue one goal while you use the other. You use what you got to get what you want, and you don't make them mutually exclusive. And you sit down with the facts on the table and you work together to determine how to do things. And the students at this very liberal university found that quite appealing to them. There was a lot of applause for that, and that was very good, and I think that's one of the things that we have to recognize that we, the American people, are not each other's enemies, but we're allowing people to manipulate us and to drive wedges between us on the basis of race, age, income, political affiliation, religion, gender.
They're just driving the wedges, driving us apart, making us hate each other, which is again contrary to our Judeo-Christian founding value of love your neighbor as yourself. And we've gotten to the point where we hate people who disagree with us. We want to cancel them. You want to make life difficult for their families. That kind of hatred, where does that lead? It leads to the same situation that we see going on in Israel and Palestine right now, where people just hate each other and want to destroy each other. That's the direction that we're moving in, and I think we all have, in our sphere of influence, the obligation to stamp out that kind of hatred and encourage people to engage in dialogue.
Think about it on an individual level when people are engaged to be married and how they just talk to each other all the time and they want to be around each other, and they want to touch each other. If they're not around each other, they're on the telephone to each other talking all the time before they get divorced. They don't talk to each other, and the next thing you know, their spouse is the devil incarnate. That's what happens when people refuse to talk to each other. I also encourage young people to look seriously at marriage and to understand marriage.
Marriage is like taking two pieces of sandpaper and rubbing them together. They come from opposite sometimes environments, very different places, and now they're under the same roof in the same bed, always together. That can cause a lot of friction. But if you keep rubbing those sandpapers together, what happens? They become smooth. You just got to stay in there long enough for it to be smooth, and what a difference it makes. And a lot of young people don't understand that as soon as there's a little bit of friction, they're ready to jump out of the situation. We need to talk to the young people in our spheres of influence about marriage and how incredibly wonderful it is to have somebody that you can always count on, who's always in your corner, who is tremendous comfort. There's nothing quite like it. It's a little piece of heaven that God gives us on earth. We just have to cultivate it the right way, use it the right way.
I remember when, before I got married, when I was a senior in high school, I was senior in college, I said, "It's time for me to stop resisting relationships." So I said to the Lord, "Please let the next relationship be the right one." And it was, and he gave me Candy. And we've been married for 48 years now, and it's been a wonderful marriage. And she was so wonderful. She has a degree from Yale, a degree from Johns Hopkins, is a very well educated, many of you know her. She's a violinist as well. And with all of that, she was willing be a stay-home mom, raise our three sons, and some people sort of denigrate that role, but they've all turned out to be very successful young men, largely because of the fact that she was willing to do that. And while she was doing that, she started the Carson Scholars Fund. She did all the talking to the lawyers, and the superintendents of schools did all the paperwork. We have a big staff that does all that now, but she was doing all of that by herself.
And there are a lot of women who don't necessarily take a job in the public sector but who do amazing things behind the scenes, and you need that combination. It makes a big difference in terms of whether one is going to be ultimately successful. But one of the things that stops so many of us in our sphere from being as effective as we can is fear. We're always thinking about, but what if this and what happens? I remember when I was a youngster, I had a tremendous fear of dogs. It affected my life. I would be on my way to school, and I would almost be there and there would be a dog and I would have to go all the way around the block, and I would be late for school. And a little, diminutive man helped me when I was eight years old. He said, "Dogs won't bother you if you're not afraid of them, just ignore them, and they will not bother you."
I said, "Are you sure about that?" He said, "Absolutely. I guarantee it." Well, feeling empowered. I said, "I'm going to try this out." So there was a dog down at the end of the block who was very vicious. Nobody liked to go down there. I said, "I'm going to go down there." And I went strolling down there very confidently, and the dog saw me, and he perked up and he said, "My goodness, dinner is being delivered."
And he came running after me, barking and snarling, and I said, "This was a mistake." And he ran right up to my leg and sniffed it, turned around, walked back to the porch, and laid down. And I never had another problem with that dog. He never came after me again. He would go after other people, but he wouldn't bother me because I wasn't afraid. Isn't the devil the same way? He says, "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." We need to think about that, but where do we get that courage? When I was a resident, one night I was on call, and it was a time of a neurosurgical meeting, so all the attendings were out of town at this meeting except for the one that had been left behind to deal with emergencies. And a young man was brought into the emergency room who'd been severely beaten with a baseball bat.
His brain was swelling, he was unconscious. The CAT scan showed hemorrhages in his brain. There was only one way to save him, and that was to do a dangerous operation in which you took out part of the temporal lobe and part of the frontal lobe to create space in the skull. I had seen such an operation before, I'd never done one, but it didn't matter. I had to have an attending anyway, so I called for the attending and couldn't reach him, and the nurses called for him, couldn't reach him, paging operators called for him, couldn't reach him, no one could reach him. The young man was dying. I had to make a credible decision. "Should I risk my career and take him to the operating room, which was illegal, and do an operation I'd never done before, or should I do the safe thing and just intubate, and put them on high-dose steroids, put them in the ICU, and let nature take its course?" And I prayed to God, and I asked God to give me the wisdom to know what to do.
And as soon as that pure ended, I felt complete peace. I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to take him to the operating room, and everything came back to me. The operation was very successful. And today, that young man is a child psychologist helping lots of other people. But interestingly, I never got into any trouble. In fact, I was praised for doing the right thing, making the right decision in a difficult situation. Of course, if the operation hadn't turned out well, that'd have been a different story, but you know what? The Lord never asked you to do anything and leave you in the lurch. He's always going to be there for you and provide whatever is needed in order for you to be successful. But we have to be courageous as we face the things around us. Yesterday I was on Newsmax talking about something was going on in the state of Oregon. The State Education Board had decided to no longer require you to be able to complete a basic skill test in order to graduate from high school.
They said it was unfair to minorities. Have you ever heard anything so racist as that? I mean, dumbing down things like that and saying that these people are too stupid to be able to complete, the real problem is the way that they teach in schools.
In Baltimore, Project Baltimore, they followed students in 23 public schools, elementary, middle, and high school, for competency and math. Out of more than 2,000 students, there was zero able to perform math at grade level. Now, obviously, all of those students are not stupid. Obviously, there's a problem with the way that they're being taught with the school system, and we have to be people who advocate for those kids. For the students, what a lot of people do is just take their kids out of the school they homeschool, which is good, or they go to private school, which is good. But we also need to recognize that we only have 330 million people. We have to compete with China and India. They have three to four times that many people. That means we need to develop all of our people. We can't leave some people out and just say too bad, because that will come back to haunt us as a nation if we do that.
And then we have to keep our eyes open and look and see what's happening around us. Look what's happening in Israel and in Gaza right now. That's a harbinger of what's going to happen here because we've had open borders for three years, and if the terrorists are not coming in those three years and making big plans for us, they are guilty of terrorist malpractice, and I'm sure that they are doing that, and that we are going to see the fruits of our stupidity in the very near future. And we're going to have to be strong and we're going to have to support each other, and we're going to have to work together, and we're going to have to work very hard to make sure that we get the kind of people in office who actually care about our country and who actually have the intellect to understand the complexities of the world.
When you look at Ukraine, I was asked at UNC about the situation with Russia and Ukraine and about Gaza's Strip and what's going on there, and how would you solve that problem? Well, I had to take that opportunity to say, "Those are problems that shouldn't be going on right now. If we had the kind of leadership that knew how to project strength, we wouldn't have those problems." You create the problems, then you ask us to solve them.
And our energy policies have empowered Putin. He wouldn't have ever been able to do what he did if we hadn't had silly energy policies and put all that money in his hand. And right now, all he has to do is continue the war by attrition to waste all of our resources and to waste our money. He can go on forever as long as we have this kind of energy policy, which is why we need very much to all be involved in the political process in your sphere of influence to make sure we get the kind of leadership that actually understands business and understands policies and understands fairness, and understands that you have to take care of your own country and your own people. It doesn't mean that you can't lend a helping hand to others. Candy and I were in Europe a month ago, and we're talking to some of the Europeans, and it was interesting hearing their perspective on us.
First of all, they said, "Our leadership is a laughing stock, but they also expressed great concern about what's happening to our country because they said that their own safety and security was dependent on ours. And if we went down, who was going to protect them? Who was going to ensure stability in the world?" So it's a much bigger issue than we think, and that's the reason that we developed the American Cornerstone Institute. When I finished my stent at HUD, my intention was to retire because I had failed retirement the first time. And I said, "This time, I'm really going to be able to retire." But I realized within a few weeks that the direction of the country was such that I couldn't have any fun playing golf and cruising around the world. So we formed American Cornerstone, which is a think-tank-slash-do-tank.
That was the name that Glenn Beck gave it because we actually do stuff, not just think about it, but thinking about those cornerstone principles that made this into a great nation. We didn't become a great nation by coincidence. It was because of the things that we believed in, like our faith, that taught us how to relate to each other, liberty, freedom to lead the life that you wanted to lead. Community, being able to work together, understanding the concept of the common good and life from the womb to the tomb. And then we have a pediatric component called the Little Patriots Program, in which we teach the children the basis of our belief system and our true history, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The fact of the matter is, there's a lot more good than there is bad and ugly. We have people who extract the bad, and they try to build everything around that and say, "What a horrible place we are."
If we were such a horrible, racist country, why are so many people trying to get in here? And when they get here, wouldn't they call all their friends and relatives and say, "Don't come here, it's a horrible place." Obviously, that's not what's going on. And we also have an Executive Branch for America program, in which we have an online course that teaches people how the government works. Right now, 90% of federal executive branch workers are leftist, and we have got to get people who are conservative and they're to balance the boat. It's all tilting to one side, and they have ways of slowing down and stopping programs. Even if you get a good administration in, it's very difficult for them to get things through because we have to have people on the ground floor who understand how the system works. So we put together the Executive Branch for America program online training. You can get certified free of charge, as is the pediatric program.
We have the state of Alaska, two months ago, adopted our Little Patriots Program as part of their official teaching program for the state. There are a number of other states who are considering it now, including one of our largest states. And interestingly enough, the progressives in that state legislature didn't want to do this because they said American Cornerstone, they're conservative. And they analyzed the program, and they finally came back and said, "We can't find anything wrong with it, so we're okay," because we tried to be unbiased but truthful, but we're the ones who really have the responsibility to occupy until he comes. And just remember who we are as a nation. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville came to this nation because the Europeans wanted somebody to analyze what was going on in America.
How could a nation barely 50 years old already be competing with them on virtually every level? De Tocqueville was going to dissect things and find out. So he looked at our government, and he was duly impressed by our separation of powers, our checks and balances. And then he looked at our business environment, and he was very impressed by the fact that we created an environment that encouraged entrepreneurship and innovation. That's why so many inventions come out of America. 90% in the last 150 years come out of this country. And then he looked at our educational system, and he was blown away. He could find a mountain man in the middle of the forest, and the guy could read, and the guy could tell him about the Declaration of Independence. And if you really want to be impressed, look up a sixth-grade exit exam from 150 years ago.
See what you had to do to get a sixth-grade certificate. You see these people today on these men on the street interviews, they don't know anything. They're completely ignorant. That's not the way our country always was. But the thing that impressed them the most were the churches as he went across this country. And he listened to the sermons that were coming from those pulpits, the sermons that encouraged a ragtag bunch of militiamen to be able to beat the most powerful and organized military force on the planet. Sermons that gave the American people a basis of morality, and he concluded his extensive analysis of America by saying, "America is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases to be great, she will cease to be good." And now it's our turn to take part in making sure that America is good. Thank you.
Roger Marsh: Well, I hope you were encouraged to do your part in carrying the mantle for God's Kingdom. Our country and our freedoms are worth fighting for. Dr. Ben Carson certainly gave an inspiring presentation, didn't he? If you missed any part of this two-day program, remember you can always listen to it on our website at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. And if the programming here at Family Talk is an encouragement to you, you definitely want to reserve your copy of our 2023 Broadcast Collection. This is a resource you can add to your home library, either as a five-disc CD set or a digital download. We'll be happy to send it to you as our way of thanking you for your gift of any amount in support of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. To receive yours, simply go to drjamesdobson.org/2023, and all the information you need will be right there. Again, that's drjamesdobson.org/2023.
And finally, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who supported our ministry financially last month while we had our special matching grant in place. It's because of listeners just like you that we are able to stay on the air, so please know how much we appreciate your prayers, and we are so grateful for your financial support of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of everyone here at the JDFI, may God continue to richly bless you and your family as you grow deeper in relationship with Him.
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Dr. James Dobson: Hello everyone. Do you need help dealing with the everyday tasks of raising a family? I'm James Dobson here, and if you do, I hope you'll tune into our next edition of Family Talk. Our main purpose in this ministry is to put tools into your hands that will strengthen your marriage and help you raise your kids. Hope to see you right here next time for another edition of Family Talk.
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