Getting Men Back as Household Leaders is the MOST Important Thing

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – We used to have men of arts and letters and that’s what they were known for.  Today we have demagogues that yell and scream and holler and hurl names and insist we look at the world through that sort of a jaded lens, that there is only right and wrong in the human realm, that there doesn’t seem to be a right and wrong that’s attached to a godly realm, that natural law somehow just came here and does not answer to supernatural law — another one of these inconsistencies with the anarchists and libertarians out there where I find a difference.  This is one of the things that was pointed out by the great writers of the 20th century like Russell Kirk, T.S. Elliott, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis. Check out the rest in today’s audio and transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Randy is in West Virginia.

Caller Randy:  Mike, how are you today?

Mike:  Good.

Caller Randy:  Good to hear you speaking the truth to these airwaves.  I’m kind of new to XM but you are definitely a breath of fresh air to the quagmire of, as you call them neoconservatives, that’s plaguing our planet more than environmentalism, that’s for sure.

Mike:  I agree.

Caller Randy:  Listening to AG over the past few months, I tend to disagree with him sometimes more than agree, but on this point today, I agree with AG, that things aren’t bad enough for the American people —

Mike:  Wait, another member of the Andrew Gruss Fan Club.

AG:  I will mark this day down.  Going forward, Randy can continue to disagree with me.

Caller Randy:  This is the day he got the swing vote to his corner.  I go back to a professor that I had in college, a very conservative, principled, [r]epublican.  He spoke to our class one day.  He was always a man with good pearls of wisdom.  He spoke to us one day as we were talking about America.  This was a good while ago, 15 years ago.  You may have heard this, Mike, because you are a man of great scholarly wisdom.  He said, “Until the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of change, we will all remain the same.”  I don’t know who wrote it or where it came from.

Mike:  Say that again.  You’re quoting this from memory?

Caller Randy:  Yes.  “Until the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of change, we will all remain the same.”

Mike:  That’s deep, man.

Caller Randy:  It’s carried with me for years.  Just like in America we slowly have been accustomed to our surroundings and slowly but surely we’ve been demoralized — the moral fabric of this nation is so tattered and torn.  Romney was not going to fix that, no matter what his religious beliefs were.  We’ve been slowly desensitized over time.  I think it’s not been enough to wake us up.  Until the pain of changing becomes greater than the pain that comes about by change itself, we’re going to stay the same.  That’s my pearl of wisdom for you today, Mr. Church.

Mike:  Let me give you one: “Nil actum reputans si quid superesset agendum.”

Caller Randy:  I’m not too big on Latin.

Mike:  Julius Caesar: “Nothing has been done as something remains to be done.”  Deep, isn’t it?

Caller Randy:  Yes, very.

Mike:  Nil actum reputans si quid superesset agendum, nothing has been done if something remains to be done.  I like your pearl of wisdom.  I might even make it the clip of the day.  I like Caesar’s pearl of wisdom.  I would prefer to be known, and I hope men like you are persuaded, to be known as some of our forefathers were known, as a man of arts and letters.  That’s what makes up a Christian gentleman, at least in part, is that you’re a man of arts and letters.  You appreciate the finer things.  That doesn’t mean you’re an artsy-fartsy snob.  It just means you recognize that there is beauty in the world.  It’s not all dystopian.  It’s not all doom and gloom.  There are some beautiful things out there.

I marvel every morning when I leave my house in Madisonville, Louisiana every day.  I look up at the sky and it was cold this morning, not a cloud, still dark enough and no streetlight near my house.  I could see about a half a million stars up there.  It’s a marvelous thing.  You look at that and go, “I am so insignificant.  I’m just a little flea in all of this.”  We used to have men of arts and letters and that’s what they were known for.  Today we have demagogues that yell and scream and holler and hurl names and insist we look at the world through that sort of a jaded lens, that there is only right and wrong in the human realm, that there doesn’t seem to be a right and wrong that’s attached to a godly realm, that natural law somehow just came here and does not answer to supernatural law — another one of these inconsistencies with the anarchists and libertarians out there where I find a difference.  This is one of the things that was pointed out by the great writers of the 20th century like Russell Kirk, T.S. Elliott, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis.

Some of these things, I think, are missing simply because our fathers and mothers did not insist upon them.  This is going back, for me, in the 1960s and ‘70s.  Maybe we can correct that mistake.  Maybe we can begin to re-insist upon that, to insist that is a method of learning.  It’s not all K-12, not all SAT scores, not all formulas and that and the other.  There’s an awful lot to be learned.  We have this beautiful thing called Western civilization — we have about 2400 years of it, going back to when Rome was Rome and not an empire — that we can study and we can learn from.  No, all of it is not going to work today, but there are some great traditions that you’ll pick up on that will work today.  Just modernize them and apply them to your daily life.  We seem to be of the mindset that, because we’re technologically advanced, technology is the only tradition we need.  The only tradition we need is we plug our phones in every night to charge them.  Oh, that’s a great tradition.  That’ll save the country.  That’ll save Western civilization.

Caller Randy:  Mike, my wife and I were talking yesterday.

Mike:  Do that more often, by the way.  Talk with your wife.  Don’t leave her, talk with her.

Caller Randy:  That’s right.  I don’t know that we can right this ship called America, but we can definitely right the ship of our marriages.  We can right the ship of our families.  We can right the ship of our communities.  If secession down the road comes, at least our communities will be strong and our families will be strong.  If we have to forge a new frontier to stabilize what we’ve got, at least we’re starting in the right place.

Mike:  There’s some land in Montana we could settle, buddy, if they’ll have us.  Randy, God bless, my friend.  Great call.

End Mike Church Show Transcript