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23 January 2009

Mike Huckabee Talks to Boy Scouts in Wisconsin

Posted by admin under: politics .

(hat tip: GOP 12)

Update: I transcribed the video. Why? Mainly because I can read faster than I can listen. Of course, you don’t get a sense for his cadence and inflection in a transcription, but you can find things faster. Also, it’s really good for punishing yourself. Honestly, just try to transcribe an eight minute speech. It’s difficult. Anyway, here it is.

Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee
Potawatomi Area Council Boy Scout fundraiser breakfast 1/22/2009

The one thing that I’ve found across this country was that it didn’t matter whether people knew who I was, because it wasn’t about me. It was about something bigger and more important. And that’s the basic, wonderful, fundamental values of being an American. And I don’t know of any program in this country that more exemplifies and enhances those values than Scouting. And part of the reason is, it’s because you take young men out on the camping expedition, some of these kids have never been outside of the jungle of concrete and steel… You put them out there in the world that God made, as he made it, and you give them the responsibility of living out there for a weekend… And I’ve heard about one of the camping trips that was taken here a couple of weeks ago with some men in 7 degree weather. And I was impressed. I gotta be honest with you ’cause when I was in Scouts as a kid… I was in Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts. When I was in Scouts we thought we took a cold weather camp out if it was under 50 degrees. These kids are out in 7 degrees and they made it.

What did that teach them? It taught them their skills of being able to take on adversity and overcome it. And I’ll bet you every one of those kids will be talking about that as long as they live. Except the kids that were frozen and are still out there. And they’ll find them in spring. Moms and dads will wonder, “What happened to my kid?”Dig ‘em out of the snow here one of these days. Truth is, I think all of us understand that when, when a, a young person is given responsibility it’s life changing. Life changing. And when a young person is accountable for the results of that responsibility, it’s life changing.

And the fact is, most all of us will end up paying for the children of our community one way or another. It used to just irritate me. In fact, it would frustrate me when I would see how much money we were spending in our state budget… to deal with kids who ended up in our juvenile detention centers because I don’t know what it costs in Wisconsin, in Arkansas it was between 60 and 80 thousand dollars per year, per kid, if that kid became a ward of the state and we had to absorb him in the juvenile justice system. Because the constitutional requirements of providing everything from 24 hour a day protection and provision plus education, usually almost a one on one level of education to meet all the constitutional requirements… And you start adding up the medical expenses and everything else, you’re looking at 60 to 80 thousand dollars per kid per year for every kid we took into the system and we had to take care of them. And somebody says, “My Gosh. Why is government so expensive?” It’s not for any reason primarily other than this. Because we need to build a better people. And a lot of families aren’t doing it. And I wish they were and I hope they will, but in the meantime for a hundred dollars a kid, per year, they can be in the Scouting program right here.

I don’t know about you, but I would think that a hundred dollars investment in a kid before he gets in trouble is a heck of a lot better deal than a 60 to 80 thousand dollar investment per year, because that kid never learned the basic values where he started his oath by saying, “On my honor”. I think those are the three most powerful words that Scouting teaches a kid. On my honor. If there’s any reason for which a young man ought to be encouraged to be in Scouting it’s so that he will learn those three words. On my honor. That’s a word you don’t hear much any more, in our culture. We think about life as all about us. But to say that I’m going to do something on my honor means that I’m going to do it whether people see me do it or not. It means I’m going to do it because it’s the right thing to do and I’m not doing it because I’m gonna get a temporal reward. I’m doing it because it is the right thing to do and I should do it, because not what I get for it, but what I become as a result of it. When I say I’m gonna do something on my honor it means I’m gonna do it not because somebody has forced me, but because the pressure to do it comes from within not from without. It’s not somebody standing over me watching to see and making sure that I do it. It’s something inside of me saying I’ve gotta do it because my ultimate accountability is not to a person out there, my boss, my mom, my dad or my Scoutmaster, the ultimate person to whom I’m responsible is the God who created me, the God to whom I’m gonna answer, and the God to whom, thank God, Scouting still recognizes, appreciates… And if there’s one thing I love about Scouting is that it has not flinched and it has not run and it has not been afraid to say that reverence and a respect for God is an important part of being a total young man. I’m grateful that Scouting still believes that we’re right to believe in God.

A few years ago I spoke at a prayer breakfast in California and before I spoke there was a man who spoke, his name was Dave, and he’d been a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He told a story I’ll never forget and I asked him to describe it in detail after the event. But he said during the course of his imprisonment in the North Vietnamese prison he said they were taking many beatings and tortures and it was just almost unbearable. And many of them were on the verge of breaking. He said their senior officer gave them three words that kept them from breaking and kept them going for the seven years they were in captivity. And he said those three words that that senior officer told them they would repeat to themselves and as one was being led, being led away for the beating or the torture or the interrogation the other inmates would whisper to him these three words. And as they would come back these three words would be uttered again. In the night they would whisper them to themselves and they would speak them openly when the guards couldn’t hear. They sustained them through seven years of the most horrible experiences that a human being could endure.

And I was curious when he was talking, what were those three words, and I thought maybe those three words were God bless America, but he said those weren’t the words. And I thought maybe the words were, love your family, but those weren’t the words. And I couldn’t imagine what were those three words. And then he told me. He said those three words were these: return with honor. Return with honor. And he said they decided among themselves they might not return with their health. Some of them might not even return with their lives. Some might not return at all, but if they did in fact return the one thing they could guarantee , the one thing that those cruel guards could not strip from them and take from them, they could not beat out of them was the one thing that they held within themselves and that was their honor. And they determined and purposed that no matter what they would return with honor. And he said the greatest day of his life was when he stepped off the airplane at the Clark airbase in the Philippines having been in that prison for seven years, he saluted those who welcomed him and he realized that the one goal he had he had achieved. He had returned with honor. I envision a nation where a young man grow up with an understanding of personal responsibility and accountability, but above all they grow up with an understanding of what it means to live their lives on their honor. I can’t think of a better way in which we invest, not just in the young men, but the future work force, the future leaders than to make sure that there are kids growing up in your community and across this nation who know what honor is all about.

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