So thank you very much. If you would like to make a donation, you can see me afterwards, and i can introduce you to the right people who would love to talk with you. So a little bit of housekeeping. Im going to introduce our author, Erick Erickson, and then hes going to speak a little bit, and then well open the floor up to questions. If you do have a question, please coup up at the mic queue end an the mic over here. We want the audience at home to be able to here as well. Erick erickson is the popular host of atlantas evening news, 95. 5 fm. Hes the former editor of red state. He launched his web site, the resurgent, in 2016. Hes also a Fox News Contributor who the atlantic has called the most powerful conservative in America Today. He studied Political Science and history at Mercer University and earned a law degree at walter f. George school of law. He lives in macon, georgia, with his family. In late 2016 he and his wife were both diagnosed with grave medical conditions. In the midst of his wifes battle with cancer, he was rushed to the hospital, his lungs filled with a potentially fatal influx of blood clots. Facing this and contemplating his mortality, erickson published an unusual piece to his web site, the resurgent, which gets more than 2. 8 Million Viewers per month. Ericksons text was unlike anything hed ever published before. It wasnt a story about washington intrigue or days news. Instead, he wrote about values, the enduring lessons that he would want his children to live by even if he were no longer with them. The piece went viral with an overwhelming response that stretched far beyond ericksons fan base. David brooks contrasting the essay with the values demonstrated by donald trump wrote that erickson and his wife are, quote, both living lives of love, faith, devotion and service. Both have an ultimate confidence in the goodness of creation and their gracefilled place in it. You may share that faith or not, but erickson is living an attractive life excuse me, an attached life emotionally, spiritually, morally and communeally. Id like to welcome. Eric son. [applause] [inaudible conversations] probably so. If im going to read, i probably need a copy. [laughter] i forgot to bring one. Thanks. I got it. Thank you all for having me. Thanks to those of you watching live. My name is Erick Erickson, i am from a rural part of louisiana, and when i was 5 years old, my dads company was an oil company and gave him a choice, move to dubai or find a new job. So when i was little, we moved to the middle east and lived there for about ten years. The cool thing about growing up there is that every three months we had to leave the country to get ours visas renewed, and our dads company would pay for it. Ive till been to more countries than states. I have been to montana to perform a wedding, the downside of being in seminary is all your friends want you to do their wedding for you. So far no divorces. And so ive seen montana, but ive never seen wyoming or dye, ive never really or idaho, never really been into the Rocky Mountains before, never been to the west coast, although im going to los angeles this coming week. And it really was an eyeopening experiment traveling abroad. And i know my kids are never going to have that experience. It definitely really shaped who i was to particularly be in the middle east in the 1980s during the iran iraq war, multiple times having people try to blow our school up, having bomb threats called in from various organizations, having to have our sandwiches opened by guards to look for explosives as we walked to school had the morning. We walked to school. We lived many an open neighborhood. And then to move home where overseas we had a lot of camel racing and cricket and soccer, and politics became kind of a connection to me to be connected as an american. And i became a political junkie. I went to college. Actually, being from louisiana suffer vied the ed win Edwards David duke race where my parents had the sticker that said vote for the crook, its important. And left shortly thereafter to go to college in georgia where i met my wife and stayed and made a home and went to law school, practiced law miserably for five years. And one day one of the partners at my law firm came in and asked me, he said do you know what the definition of a dumb ass is . I said, no. He said, you, go do politic, thats what you like. So i did. Things kind of exploded. In 2009cnn called and asked if i wanted a job and had a friend here who had to to put up with me for three years at cnn. And after the 2012 election, moved over to fox where ive been since. And my life has revolved around politics day in and day out. Its somewhat funny, because my wife is not a political creature9 at all. I got to drive in jack kemps motorcade in 1986, and my wife said, thats great, but whos jack kemp . I said, hes running for Vice President. And she was silent for a minute and said, you have to campaign to be the Vice President of the university . [laughter] she not a political creature at all. We dont discuss politics at home. I have in the past several yearing, though, become more and more committed to my faith. I started going to seminary largely because i talk about faith and culture on my Radio Program in atlanta and started getting a lot of smaller churches, they would call and say could you fill in on sunday for the pastor. Hes going to be gone. And i would say, no, because i had never been to seminary, and i kept getting so many of these requests, i figured it was probably time to go to seminary. Then they found out i was going to reformed seminary, and one of them have called since. I love it. I take a class a semester. When i first went, the president took me out to lunch and said you have to make me a promise before you go to seminary. I said, okay, what. Make the promise, and ill tell you what youre promising. So i made the promise and he said, good, dont go to seminary. And i said, well, how is this going to work . Id already paid the tuition. He said, well, you can come take classes, but if yo go to seminary you go take seminary, youre going to sound like that on the radio. Your ratings will tank. So i go to class. I just take classes. Ive taken the systematic classes, the theological classes, knockout making my way eventually, ill have a degree, but ive enjoyed it. In the process ive realized more and more my politics and my faith were butting heads, and i needed to do a better job of reconciling my politics to my faith instead of my faith to politics. And this past year i think i saw many of my friends choose the opposite way of trying to conform their faith to their politics instead of the other way around. As a committed christian and conservative i cant support donald trump for president even though i am a republican and a conservative i wasnt going to vote for him. We had people on our doorstep, armed guards in our house. My children met people who wanted them to know their father was destroying the country and they needed to do something, they would come him in tears because kids would ask had i been shot or was i going to be shot or their parents hated me and they needed to know it. It was hard on the whole family. I was having a harder time breathing. I decided to get back in shape and joined the crossfit which i actually enjoyed but couldnt keep up. I would hit 40 and i am getting old, that i thought it was allergies and didnt know what it was and finally in mid april 2016, the stress of this and deciding it is the stress, i was out of breath, literally laying my head on the pillow, it left me out of breath rolling over in bed would leave me gasping and my wife made me go to the doctor. I didnt have a choice. She hid my laptop, took away my radio microphone and made me go to the doctor and i went and next thing i knew i was wheeled into a hospital. As they were pushing me into the ct machine to scan my lungs my wife got a call on her cell phone and the waiting room from doctors in the mayo clinic who thought she needed to have her lungs checked. As i get out of the ct scan, the technicians arent supposed to tell you anything and this young man comes in and doesnt want to make eye contact with me and says should i strap him down . I just laughed, it is that bad . He put his hand on my chest and said please dont move, you should be dead. They start strapping me down and moved me to a stretcher, as i am going, they have my scan on the board and putting ivs in me, the doctor on call i could tell was looking at my scan and says have you taken his body to the morgue yet. My blood oxygen level was below 90 and i had more blood clots in my lungs than they could count. I have yet to see a doctor since then who has looked at me, they all look at me and said do you know you are supposed to be dead . I have blood clots in my lungs right now. They their old ones, not new. It made traveling on airplanes interesting but i do that. My wife flies to arizona because im not allowed to travel on a plane and they diagnosed her with an incurable form of lung cancer. It is genetic, she takes a tiny pill every day. As long as the pool works, she is fine, we go for scans between humans and our life revolve around normalcy. As long as the medicine works, she is fine. The medicine will stop working and we hope they will have created another medicine. News did come out the last couple weeks, the last 24 months, it is an amazing thing of his cancer every 24 months, on a cycle the same mutation for everybody and they keep up with developers of the medicines. While all of this is going on and protesters at the house, i realized my life revolves around politics, we dont talk about it at the house and try to find other things to talk about and it was important for me to write down for my kids, was i wanted them to know about god, what i wanted them to know about me, bad news and good things and my kids school which is connected to the church a running joke, never allowed to use an example of googleing as you never know what will come up. Them is true and a lot of it not but i learned to write to my kids about the bad i have done in the good things i have done and the regrets i have and the bad things i have done and why they should listen to me because i have done those things, learned my lesson and their favorite recipes, if i die before they wake how would they make the cinnamon rules, how would they make gumbos with leftovers from thanksgiving every year. Not that they have eaten those things right now, my kids are in the Chicken Nuggets cheese pizza phase other than Cinnamon Rolls but how would they do these things if we were both gone . What lessons what i want them to know . How would i want to know about the way i raised them the way i was raised so i started writing these things down. A piece on my website took on a life on its own after david brooks mentioned it in contrast to the president s values, around the time of the access Hollywood Tape coming out and contrasted what he thought were the president s values with mine in the way the president surrounded him with people and the way i have and it was the easiest book i have ever written. I have written three. The other two, one is worth getting the first one not. This one, the most personal book i have written and the lessons i want my kids to know, as a practicing christian i want them to understand increasingly the values in the world are going to be there values and how do they navigate a world that seems upside down from their perspective in faith, how do they reconcile being in the world with being of the world . I want them to know they need to do what is right even when it is not liked. I want them to find self worth not by the retweets they get or facebook likes or on instagram because judging their selfworth based on what other people think of them. I want them to give their selfworth from being ethical people who i want them to know their actual neighbor which is the other reason for recipes. In our world, among my political friends on both sides of the aisle we now create for ourselves, our own communities online. Everyone in our Community Looks exactly like us, think exactly like us, we share the same thought, nothing is a surprise to us because surprise is not allowed in and we dont know the person in the apartment next door for the house down the street, we dont Pay Attention to the homeless man under the bridge, he is from someone elses community, not ours. It is all online. One day you get sick and think youre going to die and need your kids to know about you and life and realize it is not our facebook friends who are bringing us meals committed our Church Friends or the person across the street who heard about the situation and we need to know our nextdoor neighbor, to know about the person down the street who has problems and needs help, to bring into our home and have around our Kitchen Table people from our church so our kids see other people share our values and bring in the people we dont know but want to know who may not share our values, show our kids we can find Common Ground as people with people who disagree completely on politics. One of the lessons i learned at cnn, i grew up watching cnn in dubai, the only American News network we had. People like James Carville and Donna Brazile where the bad guys. I was a conservative and they were on the other side of the island they are some of my best friends now. We could find Common Ground over food, we could find it over sports and we were rooting for the saints when they were losing, now a win and we still root for them. We can find other things to find Common Ground other than politics. When Henry Kissinger said about academics, the fights are so nasty because they are so meaningless, so Many Political fights are so nasty because they are so meaningless, neither side changes much of anything these days but we have the power with ourselves to change our communities by getting to know the people next door, helping the person next door when they cant help themselves, hoping but not expecting they might help us one day when we need help, showing grace to people who dont show us grace, being friends with people who dont want to be our friend. I want them to be a better person than i was. The aspiration of every parent is for them to be better. Those are the reasons i wrote this. The last chapter as i was writing the first eight chapters i would make list of the recipes i needed to include and all the things i wanted them to know that i wasnt sure i could work in somewhere else. The last chapter was almost my version of proverbs, the pieces of advice my dad gave me like dont worry about the laundry tags, no one can read them. My favorite piece of advice from my dad was move a days drive from home when you are married so you cant go home to mom after the fight. We live in as drive from my house, two hours from her parents, but then we dont fight because my wife is taller than me and has a shotgun so i am scared of her. Those are the reasons why. I will read you a little bit of this. I emailed my editor and said i want to write a chapter on what i was going through at the very moment i wrote the chapter and the title of it needs to be the theology of suffering because that is what i was dwelling on. No one is going to read a chapter entitled the theology of suffering, come up with a better name. The title is chapter 2 summer in the south and this is literally what is going on as i am writing this chapter in real time. Here is what is happening as i am writing this, gunnar was in surgery having his tonsils and adenoids removed. 5 days ago kristi, my wife, had surgery to reattach her retina. The last week i have gotten up at midnight at 4 00 in the morning and 6 00 in the morning to give gunnar Pain Medicine. Christian had to have Pain Medicine too. Thankfully my inlaws stated with us for the week. They did the laundry, helps with homework and taking care of gunnar, i worked all day in addition to being up all night, and found myself staying up until midnight to give gunnar his first dose of medicine and in a quiet part of the night doing as much as i could including writing this. Every time i would wake gunnar up he screamed for close to 20 minutes he will spit out the medicine multiple times, we go through multiple shirts he will finally be still and submit. Not sure there is a better analogy than be still and know that i am dad to paraphrase scripture. Staying up after gunnar is back to sleep, it hurts to see my wife and kids in pain. Gunnar have screams were so terrible, he holds his throat and covers his ears with his elbows. When that does not work he moves his hands from covering his ears to his throat. My doctor said his ears would hurt but i had no idea how badly they would hurt. And as people tried to sterilize themselves with pain like this, to shield themselves, i shield my kids from pain, i shield my wife from pain, pain is part of the process. How do we appreciate joy if we have not known misery, and we appreciate comfort if we have not known pain. If nothing else there is a theology to pain and suffering. I have a preacher friend who tell the story about pain from an old church, there were three women all of whom had cancer, the first took oral chemotherapy like my wife, she had no nausea but had private pain come a rash and sores in her mouth. The second took traditional chemotherapy, she lost weight, had nausea and her hair fell out. The third woman did all of it and it worked, all she had to do was prepare to die. The first woman looked at the second and was glad she kept her hair in her finger, and losing her hair was a better trade being a better pain and aching all the time. They looked at the third woman and realized they were going through a rough patch but their treatment was working. The third woman looked back at the first and was glad to have been relieved of her struggle, glad it was over, all three women looked at another woman who lost her son in a bombing, a all thought they had terrible struggles, they did not have to deal with the loss of losing a son. The fourth woman confided that she was consoling herself that her son would never go through the struggle those other women went through or to see his own mother struggle, it gave her piece. I cannot tell you how often i dwelled on this. I see my own life and my familys life a change in our perspective on others suffering in our own. Theres a couple not far from us with a gravely ill son. s older brother had the same illness and died. The nicest godly is to people, praise for them regularly, their mood is affected whether that family had a good day or bad. She is why god would do that to a family. We can look at our own struggles and our children despite the pain and discomfort we have are with us. We can also see how much more empathetic and simple, not a boast but a reality, we know from our own struggles sometimes a homecooked meal for a family in need is the best thing to do. Our suffering, even though it is different, we are able to relate to other peoples suffering, their pain and struggles shape our prayers. A preacher once came to talk about suffering and death. A lady who was in a car wreck, her daughter died, people floated her hospital room to comfort her as she lay broken, bruised and crying and no one could console her. The door opened and her best friend walked in. She climbed into the hospital bed, helped the lady and cried. These are abstract things. In our quest to shield ourselves from suffering and pain, we are losing an ability to relate and care for other people, living requires suffering. A steady flow of conformity, comfort and convenience takes appreciation from the good times takes away the good times. In 16 years of marriage, 17 as of today, christie and i were not dealing with her health or mine, the first six years were punctuated by one hospital stay or another, we had evelyn, christies neardeath experience and we had gunnar and a good time. We are back on the hard times but we had those earlier hard times and they prepared us for these hard times. Having depressed you thoroughly with i will leave you with advice i give my children at the end. Being from louisiana it felt very weird, lagniappe means middle something extra. Being at fox i pushed, i want a tv show in addition to focusing on how you get your kids through a 21stcentury that is more hostile to your values, cooking show, people who differ on politics but sit down and break bread, cook a meal together so it is possible to have conversations with people even when you disagree with them, i would show that is call the show lagniappe but no one would watch it because they dont know how to pronounce it. It would be on almost every day. In my chapter on lagniappe, all the other things i want kids to know i couldnt work into a chapter to change your pillow every year, your mattress every decade, dont keep company with people who can never admit they were wrong is always say please and thank you but never expect others to reciprocate. Learn to bake bread, the smell of yeasty joe makes a house feel like home. Get married and stay married, happiness is not the goal of marriage, happiness is the byproduct of marriage. The goal is for two people to become one in body and mind. Find a good babysitter and have a date night. Your mother and i suck at this and need to do better ourselves, by a paper road atlas and learn how to read it. Your kitchen is not your living room. Batman is the best superhero because he is not super, he is smart. Superman is boring. Your grandfather likes it is an eagle may store but in weasel never get sucked up in a jet engine, laugh but never be the weasel. Learn how to use a gun, learn how to flip an omelette, learn how to cook and have friends over and do all the cooking, you will be amazed how few people do it these days. Directed at my son, gunnar, remember to put the seat down. Learn a Foreign Language and travel to the country would always have one friend who can tell you when you screwed up surround yourself with yes blue will destroy you. When you come home at the end as a pet your dog but give the longest kiss to your spouse. Your spouse is supposed to be with you forever and the kids will move out. Pumpkins are gourds, not spices. People who like Pumpkin Spice are weird and should not be trusted. Print your best photographs. The life lesson i learned is your, print your best photographs, delete your worst, the digital age allows us to accumulate so any memories on computers but we forget to print them out, photograph memories art, they capture life as it was for a fleeting moment so print out the pictures, shares, smile at them, dont let them collect digital dust forgotten an Old Computers hard drive will eventually go bad. Eat sweet potatoes, they are important. Understand there are beautiful things you may not like but appreciate their beauty even though you do not like. Beethovens music is beautiful even if it is not your favorite. Fathers do not know everything but when our children are little they look like we know everything and are amazed by every utterance, during this time we shape our children later in life. If we live they will lie. If we are honest they will be honest. Wherever you are leave a place in better condition than you found it was a public restroom is the major exception, touch nothing in a public restroom. Your home, your school, your community and your planet should be improved. In leaving places better than you found them there will always be those who think you are doing harm or doing something wrong. Life is not fair, nor was it ever meant to be. Breaking the law is a sin but driving right at the speed limit is annoying, god will forgive you even if the Police Officer doesnt. And apologize, have an account Ability Group who can be honest with you and you with them who can push you to be better than you are. They go on from there. My last paragraph of the book to my children and i will try to read this with crying, these thoughts, words, recipes, hopes and aspirations are things i want you to cherish, christie and i are going to die one day, we know that for sure now and we all will die. We do not know the future but i know these things are true and want my children to know they are true. I worry more than i should about my kids, my mind races to or story, gunnar is headed to play in the woods, what if he gets lost or a snake bite them, evelyn is going swimming, what if she falls in and drowns. It is natural to be overprotective and over worried and overthink the dangers that lie ahead for our kids. I just want them to love god, love us and be kind, most of all your mother and i love you so much, we go into your room and watch you sleep. Evelyn, i key part of the fabric from your favorite stuffed animal in my travel bag and rub it between my hands to remind me of you. Gunnar, a keep your laugh on your phone so i can listen in here you. I love you, your mother does too. When the day comes that you can no longer see us facetoface we will just be behind the veil of eternity watching and waiting to hold you once again. Thank you. [applause] im happy to take any questions, they told me you have to go to this microphone if you have any questions, otherwise i have to talk for another 20 minutes because we are live on cspan and being a radio show host i can talk for 20 minutes. Im thoroughly and totally capable of talking. What i write in the books that i sell into everything i have ever done other than being a lawyer which is probably why it was the one job i hated. I would have been great as a lawyer but there are these things called client and they are often terrible and they often have problems have easy solutions and refused to go with the easy solution because they would rather sue the person who made the mad but after that when i was at red state someone from msnbc called and asked if i would be on msnbc in the 2004 election and i did and years later the lady who wanted me on msnbc called, was at cnn, and asked if i wanted a job at cnn and the year after that the local Radio Program director called me and asked if i could fill in for a man on the radio the next day. I had been on the radio before to talk about a legal issue and they remembered me. When i got to the station the next morning it turns out the individual was arrested in a crack house. The day turned into a weekend a week turned into three months of unpaid they paid me in expired Gift Certificates at Outback Steakhouse which i didnt know they were expired when i was given them. When i was there the radio people in atlanta, one of them read my website, saw i was on the radio and asked if i wanted a weekend show. I said no, i was doing cnn, doing red state, never saw my family to begin with. Then asked if i would fill in for herman cain one night. I filled in for herman cain and at the end of the show a group of people in suits came into the room and i thought you were going to say i was never allowed in the building again and instead they said herman cain is going to run for president , we dont want you to have a weekend show, will you take his spot on the radio . I had never had a job in radio before and they did not know that when they asked me the question. They assumed i had been on the radio more than the week i had been. I was 9 00 to midnight for three weeks until herman left and then 7 00 to 10 00 and 6 00 to 9 00 and now i am 5 00 to 7 00, the largest radio show in the southeast, in atlanta the most listened to radio show on any station regardless of format and i spent two hours a day talking about whatever i want to talk about. Having a wife and two kids it is the two hours i get a word in edgewise. I stop every 6 minutes to check traffic which is why my ratings are so good in atlanta. I have people stuck in their car trying to figure out how to get home. It is not me, it is the traffic guy but i can talk about whatever i want to talk about and i found more and more nobody wants to talk about the news of the day. People are tired of it. We are not 9 months into this presidency and people are exhausted it doesnt matter what Political Party you are, people are yelling at each other and the most inconsequential things on the planet are the most consequential things on the planet and they are getting online and finding people who agree with them to get together so they can vent to each other and have cathartic experiences and meanwhile community is collapsing around them. People are losing their minds, we are all tuning into the tv and radio stations where everybody agrees with us and i have to tell you coming out as a conservative in 2016, being a guest host for Rush Limbaugh and saying i wasnt going to support the president and his election everyone was pretty sure it destroyed my career. It never dawned on me i could lose my job and my Health Insurance and kill my wife, her medicine is 20,000 a month, i looked and the Affordable Care act wouldnt be affordable for that medicine. If i lost my job we would be in a world of hurt and my ratings went up instead. Part of it was i spend less time talking about the daily news. I didnt want to talk about it. I didnt support the person my visitors supported who were calling my station angrily demanding i be fired and spend more time talking about other news. When i would talk about the president ial race i spent a lot of time critically of my own side particularly people of faith who seemed to have put their faith in a politician instead of a savior in heaven. My disappointment with that. The ratings kept going up. A diverse audience over time, i have been blessed when everybody i was destroying my career, the show grew and i got a book out of it called the Health Situation. I have thought for a long time, to ask people this question, i will ask you, with just one word of preface, you know the definition, i am sure, of profane. I personally think the prices we have to pay for medicine, that was prompted by your 20,000 a month is absolutely profane and knowing if there is a just god in heaven, somebody has got to answer for that. What do you think . I a lot of people will be answering for a lot of things on that last day. The importance is believing there is going to be that last day. Someone asked a wild back if i really believed that, yes i do. Not only do i believe it, it gives me a lot of comfort the we may see no justice in this lifetime but we will see what it is in the next lifetime. My wife, it is a miracle of modern medicine that a genetic medicine could be developed for a particular form of cancer that very few people have and i understand the cost of medicine because so few people have it and then you read about the guy who bought the epipen and jacked up the price on the epipen and things like that and you look and wonder what is going on. All i can say is dont believe the myth that people are really good and humanity is really good, we are a bunch of sinners which i tell people i am a conservative because i am a christian and i know everybody is a sinner and i want as few of them in charge of me as possible and government and the people in the people in charge and the rank cynicism, i dont want my kids to have that. I dont want them to be so jaded that nothing can matter because i do know things matter. I was on a city council for a term. On my radio job i had to resign early because i couldnt have a parttime elected official job and a fulltime radio job and it was the most miserable four years of my life. Yet somebodys trash does not get collected you will get yelled at in the Grocery Store even if it wasnt your fault. The only reason i ran for office is it dawned on me when i went to do a tv interview, i was using a local studio and drove downtown and there were ten massage parlors closed during the day but every one of them was open with lines out the door and i couldnt figure out what was going on. A lot of these places are fronts for human trafficking. Sure enough i ran for office and was shocked and urged the police to do investigations, one of these places was shuttered as fronts for human trafficking, local landlords are politically connected and rent from them knowing they can stop the investigations. I refuse passing an ordinance. The guy kept running into was people say why are you directing people from bad crimes to this, this is consenting adults, pay no attention to the human trafficking, they cant get proof so me, a conservative who does not believe in Big Government came up with the greatest way to show these places down as the regulatory state. We went to the legitimate massage parlors with books of clients and light bulbs and clean Running Water and people were not allowed to live in or over the shop. We passed a law that said if you have a massage parlor you have to have a log of customers and light bulbs in every room the work and not allowed to live there. Amazingly, none of these places are open anymore because they dont want to comply with basic regulations is you dont need the police to shut things down, send in a business license, they love to shut people down and it worked. I want my child to experience the cynicism i think is pervasive today that i experience in my own life about politics. What would you suggest we can do to move ourselves and our posterity away from the cynicism that seems so pervasive in our political culture . This is not a political point and i know it will sound like that, but stop looking to a group of people in washington dc to provide your solutions. Look to your local government and look to your local community and look to your local nonprofits and your local churches and find solutions locally. This is a philosophical thing. Some will disagree but when we concentrate everything and all our decisionmaking in one location, in addition to allowing us to be cynical when it doesnt go our way, it makes every fight a hill to die on because every fight is about that and the founders wisely said federalism is the solution, you should be able to live your life the way you want to live your life, people of like mind, moved to another state if you find disagreement instead of having 1sizefitsall, everything, everywhere, Big Government. What i found is whether you are conservative or liberal you think Washington Matters most and it was never designed to be that way. We have by focusing on it and focusing on the problem there and allowing it to become as powerful as it has we give up on our local community. The number of counties in this country that have in my situation single people running for open seats on School Boards or City Councils or county commissions is growing because people arent looking to their local county for solutions so why bother running for office. It is the one guy that covets power who runs. Local person who has a kid in a local Public School sees a problem and once the problem fixed and washington wont fix that, the local school board is. Reengaging our local communities around the dinner table, on the sidewalk, city council, is so important as a part of civic commitment in this country where we are not looking too far off places to solve our problems. I really want my kids, i write about this in before you wake life lessons from a father to his children, to understand they are the masters of their own destiny in that regard, they need to take charge of their lives and no one is going to solve the problems for them. They are going to have to. I learned that with my wifes Health Situation and my Health Situation, it is us having to go to the doctor, people are coming to us, we have to go to them, we have to keep doing it, we have to engage. The lack of engagement is what breed cynicism. Frankly it is the engagement where we dont matter. None of us, doesnt vary or politics, in washington, they know how to micro target and as long as they get so many votes from certain people they can get elected. The individual doesnt matter. The map matters. The individual matters locally. What you do whether you are from nashville or any city in your local community matters. You will affect more people on a daily basis by going down to local soup kitchen and helping them feed others and you will by picking up the phone and yelling at a College Student in washington who works for your congressman. If we could just get back to that and take care of each other locally instead of saying someone else will do it. I will stop here, in my gospel class in seminary we spent three weeks on the sermon on the mount and what it means and what is judging, what is jesus talking about and essentially he is talking about the concept of the old testament, god takes care of his people and people are supposed to take care of each other. The rich person who has a lot is supposed to take care of the poor person can you cant compel them to, they are supposed to because they are an ethical person. Of the poor person finds himself rich and the rich person find some poor, the roles reversed and people take care of each other in their local communities. The is lewis, a great quote, he is convinced that god did not intend for us to care about far off disasters but the disaster in our backyard. His point was the rise of global news, we care about something terrible on the other side of the world that 100 years ago we would heard about a month from now it gets us all amped up. A usa today story the other day, the supervolcano in yellowstone may explode earlier than expected and wipe out all life on earth. If you read it we are still about 400,000 years away from when that is supposed to be but you had to read to the bottom of the story to find it out. We amp ourselves up on this and care about things and worry about things, and if nothing else this past year taught me my favorite verse of the bible is why worry about tomorrow, it will take care of itself. Focus on today. We need to be doing more of that and caring for people in our communities and our families and friends and not worrying about things that happened far off that we have no control or power over and no one else does either. Not to say we are not supposed to know about them or maybe we can find answers or not supposed to send people out to help the poor in other countries but it is to say there is a great failure in the Christian Church in America Today where we send kids to mexico to hammer nails when we have Homeless People down the street that we ignore because we dont consider that a mission deal. It is a damning indictment of the American Church that we have a lot of kids from inner cities with no fathers at home in crumbling Public Schools when you have these great Church Facilities that are abandoned for five days that they could open the door and give these kids a better smaller education in their neighborhood where the church is and open the facilities to these people. We have lost our priorities. The American Church has lost its priorities, we see from this election, i think, where so many Church Leaders decided to get political and cast their lot saying cyrus the great was returning us to jerusalem and letting us rebuild the temple. The temple has already built and rose again and ascended into heaven. I dont know why we are looking to build that on this planet. It pains me to see so many people looking for Political Solutions for spiritual problems. Thank you all very much on that note. I hope you will buy a copy of the book and read it, pass it on to your family and if nothing else i have my family gumbo recipe in their and the most controversial part of my book i discovered in the last two weeks is my wifes familys palmetto cheese recipe is in there. Those of you from the south know that every family has a different recipe. Ive been told by two people that my wifes is an inferior product because it doesnt have war stir the they dont have to have that pointed out. It is an amazing thing how food can make people angry but it can also bring you together around the dinner table and there are three recipes to accomplish that. Thank you for having me today, thank you. [applause] thank you for being here, thank you for joining us on booktv. If you would like to talk to Erick Erickson or ask questions or get a copy of the book we will meet you at the signing colonnade at the war memorial plasma. Thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] welcome, everyone. We are happy to have you at the southern festival of books. My name is andy bennett, i am the host for this session. The southern festival of books depend on many sources of funding including individual donations. Please consider any amount that you can. You can donate by website, by faceok