February 12, 2009 - 12:35 ET
12 Values
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Honesty
Reverence
Hope
Thrift
Humility
Charity
Sincerity
Moderation
Hard Work
Courage
Personal Responsibility
Friendship
See our complete 9 Principles We Surround Them page...
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GLENN: But there's more because the secret is really truly in We the People.
Nobody is really talking about solutions. They are talking about Band-Aids. Let me just share with you just an analogy here with the Titanic. The Titanic is going down. Who cares about the ship. It's the people on board because the people can go and build another ship and it can be better and stronger and take the things that we learned from this ship, which we did, and build another better one. It's the people on board, not the ship. And the captain is woken up from a dead sleep and they say, "Captain, captain, we hit an iceberg." Now, somebody went down to look at the hole. They knew what it was and they came back up. And the captain said, "Can we seal it off." "No, captain, this is really bad." So what should the captain do? The captain immediately should say, "Head for the lifeboats."
The second thing you should do is basically what he has done. "Would you guys just play some music here so people don't freak out?" But he shouldn't say that until he said, "Can we patch the hole." "No, captain, we can't." "Is there anything we can do to slow the sinking down?" "Well, we could try this and this and this." "Good, try it. Slow it down." "But captain, you know it's going to sink anyway?" "Yes, I do. Slow it down." Why would the captain want to do that? Because he wants more people in the lifeboat because he knows it's not the ship. It's the people. Slow the sinking down.
I contend, and I have this from good authority that that is exactly what the idea was back in November. The ship is sinking. Slow it down. Get more people into the lifeboats. But people are in denial. This ship, they are the people that are still sitting in the bar at the Titanic. It's a Titanic! It's unsinkable! It will never sink. Those are the people -- don't be one of those people. Too many Americans are still sitting in that bar. Too many Americans are saying, "Oh, it's the Titanic, I'm not getting out -- it's cold outside. It's not going to sink. Until it's too late and then they're trapped. The problem is the captain, nobody believes the captain. They believe the captain has ulterior motives because the captain has been untrustworthy. And it's not Obama. It's Obama and it's been Bush and it's been the Treasury, the last one, this one, the Fed, the congress. Nobody's told us the truth. So we don't trust any of the crew members. So you've got to look for somebody in your life that you do trust and everybody's looking for somebody they trust. Be that person. The ship is sinking. Get people into a lifeboat. The nine principles are the first step, but in the next few minutes I'm going to lay out the second step and the third. Here's the second step. The nine principles can't stand by their own. Now, I have done -- somebody called me and asked me, "Glenn, where did you get the nine principles." They really came from me of just digesting the founding fathers. I went to religious text, I went to different faiths to look at what their theology taught, I read the words of the founding fathers, the 5,000 Year Leap, the Boy Scout handbook. I took all of this stuff and then I just sat with it for a while and I came up with the nine principles. But I also came up with values. Because if the point is We the People, if that's how this whole system was designed and if the ship is going down and it's not the ship, it's the people, if you really, truly believe in the people, well, then power to the people works both ways. The people also are responsible for the downfall. The people, not just the Fed, not just those greedy Wall Streeters, not just the heads of banks, not just the people in congress but each of us, to varying degrees each of us. Believe me, I don't know if you've been a long-term listener of this program but hopefully you've heard a change in my voice in the last six months and the last year and the last two years and anybody who's been listening since I started doing talk radio in 2000. There's a difference in my voice. Hopefully a little bit more responsible. I still am a stupid, you know, self-educated guy from time to time. I still say stupid things that I regret. I still say things in comedy that people take out of context, but I am not the guy who says the donkeys are bad and the elephants are good. I will say, "Here's a good donkey, here's a good elephant, here's a bad elephant, here's a bad donkey."
More importantly, it's not about the individuals, it's about the direction that they're taking us and the direction that we set for ourselves, and we can correct all of these problems if we have the nine principles and then the twelve values.
So here are the twelve values, and we'll go over these a little bit at a time, but the twelve values are honesty. The problem is we don't have any trust for one another anymore. Bernie Madoff, the banks, the politics, there's no honesty. We must mean what we say and say what we mean. As individuals, never let anyone -- make a vow today. You will never let anyone doubt your word. Believe me, it is going to take you a very long time to change that. I have been trying since 1996 and people still doubt my word from time to time if they don't know me. That's okay. I understand that. Mean what you say and say what you mean.
Reverence. Reverence. Why reverence? The lack of reverence causes a brashness, a coarseness, a noise in our society. Reverence has -- a lack of reverence has us watching the cakes and the circuses. Quick! Reverence to me means quiet, reflective, be still, listen, ponder. In our society we have not given any time to something that's extraordinarily important. Reverence. Silence. Ponder.
Hope. A lot of people say that I don't have a lot of hope. I do. The opposite of hope is death, destruction, despair, but hope is just a belief in the potential, just a belief in America's promise. But you have to know what that promise is. You have to know what America is. That goes back to the nine values -- the nine principles. Get the nine principles. You know who you are, you know what America. That's where your hope comes from. There will be a brighter tomorrow. It's what helps a single mom get up every day: Hope.
Thrift. We've become a disposable society, everything. How many times do your kids just have a toy and drop it? How many times have your kids said this to you? My kids have: Oh, well, I broke it; we'll get another one. I started saying about a year ago, "No, we won't. We'll fix it and if it can't be fixed, then we don't have another one." "What?" If we just understood thrift and life isn't disposable, how would we change our policies on life? How would we change our policies on the Earth? These are things that we could all agree on. Nobody wants the Earth to die. Nobody wants the Earth to be 1,000 degrees. Nobody wants that. Just thrift. Just understand that nothing is disposable, from people to things to the planet to the individual.
Humility. Opposite is an empire building, empire builder: "We're the empire! We're America!" Humility. It's the opposite of what we've learned from Wall Street. It's the opposite of what we have from Paris Hilton and the Prada purses, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. A humble society doesn't have a Prada purse with a little dog. They never say, "Well, we know better." If we're humble, we can find the real true us, flaws and all. We're willing to look at the "Us."
Charity, I think the opposite of charity is socialism. It's greed. But we've tried to force charity down. Charity is not socialism and socialism is not charity. Charity is about us as individuals. We care. We want to change our heart. Government's not charity. Charity's not patriotic. Pure charity is to be god-like. We lose our focus on ourself and worry about others.
Sincerity. Just live what you believe. Obama wants us to be more charitable. Joe Biden wants us to be more charitable. Joe Biden's never paid more than .8% of his income to charity. Obama just started to do it when he was running for president, and he's giving, what, 7% of his salary? Good for him. Now when nobody's watching Barack Obama, when you're long past the time that you were president, will you still be giving? I'm going to -- I'll say yes. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that, yes, you'll still be giving. But that's what sincerity really truly is all about. Be sincere. Live what you believe.
The next one is moderation. Moderation. Moderation in everything is good. By the way, a lot of these came from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. These are the things they looked at. This list like this they looked at every single day. Moderation. Benjamin Franklin said I'm not going to eat too much and I'm not going to drink too much. But really it's bigger than that. It's moderating our passions. You know, just moderate your passions. That's okay to do a little of everything. I'm an alcoholic. I can't do a little of things. So I don't do any of them. But moderate your passions. It's good to prepare for things. It would be bad for you to be living in a fallout shelter right now. But prepare. You do little things. You just stay aware. Moderation.
Hard work. I think we are being led right into a place, you know where the work ethic in America really changed was with the New Deal. Historians will tell you now that that was a pivot point in America. People worked hard. Well, you know what? If you're dependent -- the opposite of hard work is dependence. If you are dependent, you'll eventually be a slave. You lower your self-esteem. You limit your growth. But if you have hard work, you are growing, you're independent, you have self-worth. You know your own capabilities. You're honest about yourself on your limitations. You have long-term thinking. When you're working hard, you're working toward something. That gives you hope.
Courage. You don't have courage if you don't stand up, you'll look the hand that feeds you, said Patrick Henry. The opposite is cowering, panic, fear. It eventually leads to slavery. If you don't stand up, you'll lick the hand that feeds you. But where does courage come from? I think it's from living the principles and the values, honesty, hope, humility, belief in God, knowing who you are, knowing what you believe, knowing how it ends, knowing how it began. I know that people will think that I'm crazy and that's fine, but I think we're living in difficult times, and I have pondered, how does this end. I have only truly prayed for guidance and courage to do the things that he would want me to do, to say the things that he would want me to say and in the end to have the courage not to falter, to have the courage to know what the truth is because I can face anything, you can face anything if you know who you are and what's important.
Personal responsibility. Everybody wants to put the responsibility on the Democrats or the Republicans or as I did yesterday, the Fed. But you know what? Personal responsibility, did I take out too much, did I do too much, should I have done that. Own up to your own things because that's the only way you'll change things. It's okay if you make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. It humbles us, and if we're honest with each other and honest with ourselves, we become stronger.
And the last one is friendship. We all know what friendship is, but how many real friends do we have? We're researching out now in virtual friendships and everything else. We need to expand our circle of friendship. We need to start trusting one another again. We need to start seeing our neighbors again. We need to -- have you considered that if things melted down who your neighbors are? Do you trust them? Do they trust you? Can you count on each other? Our grandparents counted on each other. They counted on the neighbor. They would bring each other pies and they would share what they had. They would help each other. A lot of people would look at that, "Oh, my gosh, he was talking about, oh, it's going to break down so bad that it's going to be..." that's a good thing. As much as I hated that little street that I wrote about in my book The Christmas Sweater that my grandparents lived on, as much as I hated that when I was a kid, I'd give my right arm to live on that street again where everybody knew each other, everybody worked together. It was like a big family on that little street. While I don't have to move there, why aren't all of our streets like that now? In time I believe they're going to become those streets again and many will say that's a bad thing. Many will avoid it and they will stand in the bar there in the Titanic and you will just quietly be there to say, "Come on, into the boat. It's going to be okay." And then we will all go to shore, put our lives back in order and build a better boat.
Please share these with your friends. You'll find them both now up on the website at GlennBeck.com. Share them with your friends. If you believe in these values and you believe in these principles and you want to take a stand for these, you promise that you will live your life by these and then you will view all of the events for the day and you look for the solution of the events of the day through these values and these nine principles, then I want you to take a picture of yourself right now and send it to me at wesurroundthem@gmail.com, wesurroundthem@gmail.com. The first step is saying I'm responsible, I'm going to take a stand, I want my voice to be heard but I have something worth hearing because I know who we are. More importantly, I know who I am, and I will apply the values and the principles that I expect others to live by to my own life. Put that in a photograph to me and send it to wesurroundthem@gmail.com. Then send this e-mail that you'll find on the website to all of your friends, all of your neighbors, all those who might be saying, "It's not really -- really? What did we do?" Create your own lifeboat. I'll tell you what we're driving to, next.
