America 1

Where do we start?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Let me introduce myself. My name is Bobby Clanton. I'm uh was born in the state of Mississippi uh many years ago and um I happen to be a contractor, an American first, southerner second, and um this is my first podcast, so you're uh if you hear this podcast, you are the among the first. And uh I just appreciate you being here, anyone who's listening. And so we call this podcast what happened to America. You know, we live in a time now where we have um uh it's kind of an incredible time in one way, but also a sad time in another. And to be honest with you, you would have to be um you'd have to be older, uh over 70. You'd have to be older to understand the whole concept of what happened to America. The America that I knew from the time that I could remember anything, very young, was a more settled and a more reasonable America. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean, I suppose that if we looked around today and looked at some of the things that going on and how this has all developed into where we are, you could understand that. If you were younger, you won't you won't really get it initially, but you will get it one of these days uh when you get older. But the America that I know was uh people could buy a house, a very nice three-bedroom house for $15 or $20,000. Um but more than that, more than that. Uh an America who had just come out of the Second World War uh 15, 20 years before, and um and maybe the greatest generation had finished off the the tyrants of the world at that time, and uh we were proud. We were proud of who we were, we were proud of the nation that we had established. We were proud of the the Constitution and the founding fathers, and uh we were proud of our education system. Um we practiced our faith. No matter what uh uh Christian religion you we were, a denomination, we we practiced that and and it was important. That was a time when people um respected churches and respected people who went to church and who tried to raise their families. It was a time when when women went shopping, they actually dressed up to go do that. Uh it was a time when men worked 40 hours, uh, depending on their job, 40 hours they came home and they had uh a very nice time on the weekend with very little stress. It was a time when TVs were black and white. Um it was a time when it was a privilege to have a TV. In some places in Mississippi it was a privilege to have lights. But people found a way. They found a way. They're they had grit, they had uh all the things necessary to uh survive and to take care of their families. Um people were raised with not as much as people are raised with today. Uh I was raised as a child each year. I I got two pairs of blue jeans and two shirts to go through the school year. Uh those kind of things. Uh it was a time when people uh understood that that family was the core of everything that they were. It was a time where you respected your father. It was a time where the fathers were in the homes. It was a time when uh the mothers and the wives basically stayed home and they were they kept the family glued together, they kept the unity, they kept um the home so that all the children as well as the husband had a place to anchor themselves to, that they could look back and tell stories about things that happened in their their childhood and in their the time for their family and so forth. And so it was a different it was a different America. If you it was a time when gasoline was 29 cents a gallon, and believe me, the future of this podcast is not to linger in the old 29 cent per gallon days. This is just to beg give us a beginning, because the real question here, and the question on this podcast will all always be what happened to America, to the America that we knew, to the America that somehow has evolved into something else that most of us, certainly in my age group, would never have imagined, and certainly not in the lifetime of my grandparents. It was a time when men and women stayed together, their husband and wives, they stayed together, they raised their children, they died together, or they spent the rest of their life together, and they would bring their grandkids back, you know, because their kid their children had children. It was a time where nobody even perceived or conceived of the thought that, for instance, they would kill an unborn child simply because of a convenience or or whatever it may have been. So America was different. Uh and really, if you go back to the founding fathers, I I am certain, I am certain uh that uh if you study American history, which we did in our schools, uh you you had to know about your founding fathers. You had to know about the Constitution, you had to know uh about the Industrial Revolution and things like that, where these things evolved uh to make a a people better, a group better. There were cer certainly despicable leaders in the world at that time, indicated by the first and second world war, the Korean War, the development of nuclear power, those kind of things. But we're not too that yet. But it was a time where families stayed together. Families were not perfect, families have never been perfect. But this is where we came from. So there were various generations. When my when I was a child, one of my favorite things to do was to go and visit my grandparents. Because the grandparents uh they had uh they had uh what is the word? They they had a uh they gave you a feeling of of confidence, uh, of of things that as a child that you could look back on and observe the way they conducted the remainder of their life, and how excited they were to have the grandchildren come and stay with them in the summertime when there was no school, those kind of things. And so that America had stability, had fiber. It had uh it experienced longevity, it experienced a uh how would we say a moral and stable foundation upon which each generation could build their lives, whether it was father, whether it was grandfather or grandchildren, whatever it may be, there was always that feeling that if things weren't going so well in where you were, that there were different segments of a family, being grandparents or relatives or whatever, that you didn't feel alone. You didn't feel like you were out there by yourself. Uh also you if you um paid attention, say in school or those kind of things, you were among people that were generally like you, maybe not as poor as you were, but just regular American people. And as I said, with families and where the fathers might have had a different job than what your father had. Uh maybe they had more, maybe they had less. You you don't have you wouldn't have any way of knowing that. But America was a beacon on a hill, nothing like it. You were taught in school that there'd never been anything like America and it's and its founding and its principles and all of those things. Those things were special. And and and the people were special. When those farm boys left uh after December 7th, 1941, to go and to fight for the freedom and a fight against the uh the despotes, the the dictators, the people who thought they could rule the world, those farm boys never been outside of their I know in the South, most of the ones that I know who are all passed away now, they had never been out of Mississippi, much less go halfway around the world. And so those people, they they went, they fought, they died, they came back, they built families, right? And and they continued on after defending freedom, the freedom of people they didn't even know, you know, uh in Europe and Japan and these places, they they were defending people that they had never seen. They had never seen anybody really of any oriental race or Germans or any Europeans, those kind of things. So what kind of people were these people? Well, you would have to for me, you would have to sit down and and honestly, you would have to talk to them like I had in my lifetime, both my father who was in the Second World War, uh, and uh he never got shipped out because he went in later, he was younger. But uh you have to sit down and talk to them, talk to the to the grandparents, talk to the the people who actually lived uh during that time. So as we promote this podcast, as we go forward, we're gonna be talking about issues and things related to culture, to religion, to what the future is for this country and so forth. But I have to tell you that as the jumping off place, the basis from which we will start will be, at least from my own personal understanding, from the 40s and 50s, which has been my time, uh comparing where we are now to that. Because there, I mean, uh, to be honest, uh there has to be a comparison. We cannot believe, I and I I certainly don't personally believe that what we see today is at all what our founding fathers wanted, it's certainly not what God intended, and and uh it's not what our faith says it ought to be, it is certainly not. But in order to understand how we have progressed and whether it be up or down, I I believe it's probably down, but we have to understand from where we started. Now I can only go back to 1948. Um I tell people all the time I was born at the hospital in Marshall County, Mississippi, because I want to be cut close to my mother. That's supposed to be funny. But you know, the I can only I can only go from there and and comment on what I know. And so I know that we the changes that have taken place uh they are serious changes, and they have longer term effects than what most people think. I have been a Bible teacher for I don't know, 40 or 50 years, and I use the Bible as my base, as my point of understanding what God intends for humanity as far as redemption and all those kind of things. And I see that and I look at that and I compare it to where we are, where we are uh right now uh in our country. And I have to tell you that as we go along, I'll try to do these once a week, but I have to tell you that if you stick with this, you're gonna see some things that you've never seen, you're gonna hear some things that you've never heard before. And it's very important, okay, because it is obvious to me from a spiritual standpoint, it is obvious that uh the Bible is very clear about where we are headed. But as far as America is concerned, the question is, as I have repeated, what happened to America? How did we end up here? How is it that we begin to look at things that used to be wrong and call them right? How is it that we used to respect families, but now we say the family is not necessary? Why is it that there are groups out there who are pressing to destroy what they call the nuclear family, that is a mother, father, children, and so forth? Why is it that we have people who condemn women who want to have children and want to raise those children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? How is it that a society has evolved to the point where it will attack religion, it will attack God, it will attack gender, it will attack values, it attacks all these things to undermine and to do away with them? How is it that we have people in the world right now, especially in the United States, who um declare that there are 12, 15, 20 genders? This is insanity. It's insanity. So the question still is what happened to America? How did the America that we knew that was established by our founding fathers end up here? That's the question that we will discuss on this podcast. And I hope that if you listen, you listen on a regular basis. Because what's going to happen is, as I developed this through the conversations, through the different things that that we will look at, um we will try to determine what happened to America. Where do we go off the rails? Where did we skid off of the road to honor, integrity, respect for life, respect for religion, respect for uh those uh who are leading us, those kind of things. How did we lose, how did we lose this, or where did we lose it? The next question is has that process stopped? Will it get worse than what it is? Where are we headed there? I have to tell you that we can only go to the Bible to find that out. But the first thing that we will try to discover here is how do we um how do we determine where what where it was that we started that or that we that we came to the point where those things were not important to us anymore, to where we tried to where where we fractured the family, uh, and we began to follow after principles that would have been considered 50 years ago to be insanity. If you had asked someone in the 50s, if you had asked them, just random people on the street, anywhere you wanted to go, south, north, whatever, America. If you had asked an American back in those days, do you think that this world will ever or this country will ever evolve to the point to where it doesn't know the difference between a man and a woman? They would have probably taken you to the insane asylum if you had asked them that. They would look at you sideways and say, Are you out of your mind? How do you come up with something like that? But yet today it's talked about freely. If you had asked those same people, what what about uh a child being born and you want to change its gender? I suspect that about the third question like that they would have been calling the white coats for you. So you see, it's it's a very distinguishable difference, it's a very uh identifiable and quantifiable change. Uh and the thing is to recognize the change, you have to be older, you have to have some age and experience to understand this. Because uh how is it that our educators, so-called educators, are trying to teach our children things that would have been obscenely objected to 50 years ago, even 30 years ago. And so you can imagine that the question where what happened to America that is the question that uh overshadows us today. What happened to America? We're gonna try to find that out, and we're gonna have different subjects each week and uh we will discuss those. And if it's possible, uh as I get familiar with this podcasting thing, uh it may be that we can have some people call in if we can manage to figure out how to do that. But you follow us, I can guarantee this. We may not have all the answers, but we will be able to identify where it all started or thereabouts, and what we can expect if it continues to trend in the way that it's going. Now, um God's word will be involved in this as we do that, but we're gonna practically look at it in a secular way, uh, and then we'll begin to talk about where it's headed from here, if there are any predictions uh for the future on how this will all work. So I just ask that you listen, you listen intently, you come back and uh hang with us, and if you have any comments, uh we'll s have a place where you can email your kind comments, and uh we'll try to answer them in the next podcast. So until next time, I just pray that you will be open-minded, you will come back and visit us, and that you will prayerfully listen to what we have to say.