Lazarus Lake: belief

Transcript context

…If you put aside the 17 people who have finished Barkley and just look at American society as a whole, do you see overall a shortage of stoicism and inner strength, a decline of manliness? How do you view where we’re headed as a country? Well, up until just a couple of years ago, I was an assistant coach on a high school basketball team, and today’s kids are great. I go out and do these journey runs where I’m just exposed and out there with people, and people are good. We just had an event where we took 82 people, and we put them on buses and we bused them 350 miles away. They parked in a hayfield on top of a mountain in north Georgia. We bused them 350 miles away and put them on the side of the road with a map. They had 10 days to get back to their car. They set out, the first few people that went through the towns on the way — they would think “That’s a really fast homeless guy,” and then they would ask, “What’s going on?” The next thing you knew, people were putting coolers of drinks out by the road outside their house. They were loading up stuff and taking it and driving down the road to see where the runners were. The race is called the Heart of the South, and it’s not about the physical location; it’s about the people. The rural South doesn’t have a great reputation as a humanitarian area, but the support that people got along the way and the help and the things that everyone did for them — and no one was asking who was a Republican or who was a Democrat. There were people helping people, being out on the road as opposed to just watching the selective stuff on TV, and working with the kids instead of just reading about them. This is a great place, and it’s full of good people. I think that if we just don’t lose our confidence in ourselves, this country is going the right way. But say I read in the newspapers, the military complains that some fairly high percentage of American kids are not in good enough shape to even join the military. Should I dismiss that, or is it correct? What do you think?…

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