Ben Carson
In 1987, a neurosurgeon from Detroit became the first person to separate twins conjoined at the head and have them both survive. That doctor, Ben Carson, now devotes much of his energy to politics, where he is a conservative favorite. In his new book, “One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future,” Carson lays out his vision for eliminating the divisiveness in politics today and revitalizing America. He recently spoke with U.S. News about building a more educated, literate populace and tackling some of the country’s major challenges. Excerpts:
What is the biggest problem facing our nation today?
The reason I titled the book “One Nation” is to emphasize the fact that our strength comes from our unity. And yet we have elements today that drive a wedge into any small crack that they can find to create a war – a war on women, race wars, age wars, income wars, religious wars, any kind of war that’s possible. Our system does work. It works extremely well. But we have to stop fighting each other.
In one of your chapters, you write about how a highway cleanup crew mirrors our political landscape. What do you mean by that?
Here was a group of people who normally don’t work together, don’t really care what the other is doing, and they discovered that, by working efficiently together, they could get a great deal done. They managed to get a lot more done than any other crew, and in the process of working together, they became a very cohesive force. That’s very much the same thing that has the possibility of happening in our society.
What are some steps that individuals can follow to help achieve a stronger society?
One of the big things I encourage people to do is read. If people spent half an hour a day reading, in a year’s time they would be different people. The other thing is talk. We have a tendency to clam up because we don’t want anybody to be offended. We need to get out of that mentality. Instead of being politically correct in everything we say and trying to censor everything we say, we need to be learning how to talk without taking offense, learning to respect what other people have to say, and be able to take a stand from our position.
What’s your assessment of health care in the U.S., and what should we do about it?
We spend twice as much per capita as the next closest nation in the world on health care, and yet we have horrible access problems and a host of other things that you just wouldn’t expect in America. And a lot of it stems from the fact that we have a humongous bureaucratic system. The [Veterans Affairs] health scandal is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I’ve worked in VA hospitals. Wonderful, wonderful people working there. Wonderful patients. Huge amounts of bureaucracy between those wonderful people and the patients. What we want to do with health care is put it back in the hands of the individuals and their health care providers without all the middle.
Are you going to run for president?
I don’t know yet. I’m kind of waiting to see what the people want to do. There are still a lot of people clamoring for me to do it. [If that’s the case,] I think it would probably be unpatriotic to do what I want to do, which is, frankly, retire or relax.
So, let’s say, hypothetically speaking, you’re the president. What would you do?
First, I would have a talk with Congress. I would charge it with simplifying the tax code and making it fair. I would also emphasize that we are not going to raise the debt ceiling ever again. We’re going to reduce the government by attrition. Thousands of people are going to retire each year. We’re not going to replace them. And in four to five years, the government would be down to the size that it needs to be. We will begin to look at how we can use our technology to become an informed populace again, the way we can use virtual classrooms and things of that nature. I would get the NASA program off the ground because enormous numbers of inventions came out of NASA, things that we use every day. And you know we need to bring the innovative spirit back to America.
As an African-American, can you talk a bit about minority communities in the U.S.?
Minority communities in this country have obviously made enormous amounts of progress, particularly the African-American community right up until the ’60s. And then it became pretty stagnant after that point. [President Lyndon] Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty adopted the attitude “There, there, you poor little thing. I’m going to take care of you.” That was not a good thing. Now you have chronic intergenerational dependency. We need to start talking about what’s going on with teen pregnancies. We need to get people talking about how they can empower themselves. That self-empowerment mentality used to be there, and a large part of it has been extinguished by the do-gooders who really are not looking at the effect of their ideology.
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