Stop Being So Cynical And Find The Beauty Around You

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Many people had the greatest of intentions and look how it all turned out.  Then the problem becomes that people will not admit, government is not allowed and will not admit its own failings.  It just hasn’t plowed enough money in it, hasn’t tried hard enough.  Now it seems like we’re stuck always looking for, always expecting the worst and the bad.  That’s no way to go through life, man.  That’s no way to even be a hopeful people. We have to search for beauty every hour of every day, it is beauty that brings God’s pleasure into our lives.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

This page is supported by your Founders Pass Subscriptions, please take our membership tour & consider a 1 year membership

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I just wanted to tell a quick anecdote.  Yesterday I am doing my due diligence as your historian or record on a script that I’m writing for a very short Project ’76 feature on Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address.  I do what I always do.  I try to find out as much information as is humanly possible to see what was going on that day, contemporary accounts that were written of people that actually witnessed the event so that we can reconstruct as accurate a picture as is humanly possible.  In letters and contemporary accounts of the day of Jefferson’s inaugural on March 6^th, I keep running across references to this river that runs smack dab through the middle of what is today Mordor on the Potomac River.  At first I just ignored it as a trivial reference.  It kept popping up.

Andrew didn’t even know this and he’s from the area.  I bet most of you that live there didn’t know it.  There is a point to me bringing this up, by the way.  There’s this creek that runs underneath the catacombs that are now Mordor on the Potomac River, Washington, DC.  It’s called the Tiber Creek.  Once upon a time, it was said by those that visited DC in the early days of it being the capital that it was the most beautiful creek in North America, that there was no finer place on Earth where one would want to spend an afternoon, according to one woman who wrote a letter.  I’m thinking if that’s the case, what happened?  Basically Washington happened to it.  The Tiber Creek is still there but not as nature intended.  It has been walled off and covered over.  Now it runs underneath the streets of the city.  Once, if you stood on a hill that abutted the banks of it, you had the beautiful view of the then first White House, which, of course, was burned down by the Brits in 1814.  AG, did you know any of that?

AG:  I did not know.

Mike:  You know nothing about the Tiber Creek.  Just based on the little thing that I sent you, would you know approximately where that is today?  Was that around the Irish joint that we had lunch?  Is that south of the Capitol?

AG:  When you shot me that email last night and I Google imaged it, it was still somewhat confusing.  I know where the IRS building is that’s built over it.  I know the general location of it.  It’s relatively close by to where the XM studios are.

Mike:  And you would never know that that thing is underneath there where once it was a grand part of nature, a natural part of DC.  Isn’t that so fitting?  They just paved it over.  [mocking] “Hey, that creek is in the way.  We need to put an IRS building there.  Build a tunnel over the top of it.”  I bring this up because there are many things in our daily lives that we miss the beauty of.  It’s one of those words that conservatives are supposed to be so familiar with, yet I believe we are so unfamiliar with, the term and use of the word “beauty.”  From everything I read about Creek Tiber, it was an absolutely beautiful little body of water.  The way it made its way through the ten mile square, as Patrick Henry called it, that is Washington, DC today was a thing for people to behold.  They actually looked forward to staying at an inn that was built on its banks.

I guarantee you in your city, wherever it is that you live today, there are places just like Tiber Creek that you probably don’t know about.  This is where you live.  This is where we call home.  I discover things about where I live all the time.  I bring that up because that’s all part of being part of a community.  Community is the foundation of republicanism.  Every founding father lived in some kind of a close-knit community.  Hell, almost every early American all the way up until the industrial age lived in some kind of close-knit community and would probably be able to tell you stories about Creek Tibers out there.  Just keep that in mind.

We always look for the negative.  We always look for the evil.  We always look for the machination of government.  We’re trained to look at the cynical.  Our brains are trained by the news media today and by the way all our business is conducted to look for the bad.  There’s got to be something wrong, [mocking] “That hamburger is not done right.”  Instead of assuming that when you’re ready to eat a meal it’s going to be fantastic, you assume the worst.  [mocking] “I bet it comes out rare.  I didn’t want it rare.  I bet that wine doesn’t taste like it’s advertised.”  We always assume the worst.  Instead of hoping and aspiring for the beautiful, we ultimately wind up hoping, aspiring, and then finding the ugly, finding the repulsive, finding the repugnant, finding the bad where good could have been identified.  That’s what happens when you sow seeds of despair on top of seeds that were sown for hope.  All these things that were done in our name, under our constitution and under the name of the government of the United States, they were all done for the greatest and most wonderful purposes.

The road to ruin is paved with good intention, and it is paved with good intention.  Many people had the greatest intentions and look how it all turned out.  Then the problem becomes that people will not admit, government is not allowed and will not admit its own failings.  It just hasn’t plowed enough money in it, hasn’t tried hard enough.  Now it seems like we’re stuck always looking for, always expecting the worst and the bad.  That’s no way to go through life, man.  That’s no way to even be a hopeful people.  No wonder our youth are so dystopian.  No wonder our fiction today foretells of a future that is so awful and horrible.

You go back to the middle part of the 19^th century when Jules Verne started writing science fiction.  Was he writing about a future built with despair?  No, the future was filled with wonder.  It was filled with all sorts of new gadgets, trips to the moon, trips to the bottom of the sea, all sorts of fantastical things that men could only imagine how wonderful it would be.  Today it’s nuclear holocaust, feral zombies roaming the countryside to eat us.  What kind of an existence is that?  We may actually be living in hell and don’t even know it.

End Mike Church Show Transcript