Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#598 Good News! We Have Faith In You! Read Great Literature and Revive Virtues To Save Our Country!
Love to hear from you; “Send us a Text Message”
Maximus in the line in the Gladiator, “What we do here echos in eternity!”
The dismal reality of American education hits hard with the revelation that only 30% of children nationwide can read at proficiency standards - a benchmark already twice watered down since 2000. But this literacy crisis merely scratches the surface of a deeper cultural problem: the systematic removal of virtue from our educational systems and social fabric.
Parents must reclaim their rightful role as primary moral educators. Families who read together and discuss virtuous behavior find themselves building relationships that withstand cultural pressures. The conversation concludes with an urgent call to action: put down the phones, pick up great books, and intentionally cultivate virtue in your children. While political change provides opportunity, the real transformation must happen family by family through purposeful transmission of timeless virtues that build character and civilization.
(The Video-Podcast of this Episode will be made available on Rumble. For past episodes on Video visit our Rumble Channel and don't forget to subscribe!)
Follow us and watch on X: John Paul II Renewal @JP2Renewal
On Rumble: JohnPaulIIRC
Catch up with the latest on our website: jp2renew.org and Sign up for our Newsletter!!
Contact Jack: info@jp2renew.org
Read Jack's Blog: https://jp2renew.org/
I'm with Tom Hampson crime investigator, crime fighter. Thomas, how are you? I'm good. How about you? Good, good, good. So we've been talking a lot about schools, the failure of schools across our nation. Schools, the failure of schools across our nation. I couldn't believe it, Tom, that the last report that came out for 2024 said that only 30% of children across our country, across our whole nation, can read at a dumbed-down proficiency standard. That's been dumbed down twice since around 2000. And so 30%, that means 70% are not reading at that and they're really lost. So many of these kids are lost and what they've done is they watered down the curriculum in schools. They watered them down. They've totally taken them out of our culture in so many ways. And so what we want to talk about today is a little bit about parents and what you can do to your kids and what kind of books can you bring, how can we bring these virtues back? So you want to unpack that just a little bit, Tom, and we'll zero in on really virtue building and the reason for this.
Speaker 1:Well, one of my favorite books as a kid was Aesop's Fables. I used to read that all the time, yeah, yeah, yeah. And great stories that teach kids about all the virtues that are required, and you have a list of a whole bunch of other ones. There's others that teach these kinds of qualities that people should have. For little kids, it's more those kind of books that you have, I think, more for high school kids. It's more books like the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings and those kinds of things where you can, where you have, where you're instilling in kids Doing the right thing. Yeah, braveheart and Gladiator, and these kind of movies that you can have children watch, where there's a clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. And I think that's what we have to get back to. Is that there's a right thing to do and there's a wrong thing to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and these virtues that we're talking about, these cardinal virtues, they're not made up yesterday. These are timeless. They come from the wisdom, literature, through Scripture, but even more when we start to look at the origins, the way, we found out a lot about these cardinal virtues which are against prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance. And these four came from the ancient Greeks, didn't they? And of course they were around before then. You made an earlier point, right before we came on, that the Aristotles, the Plato's, especially Aristotle, would take these, and Socrates too, right, I mean, they were all in that same era and we're just putting down on paper and kind of indexing them for us as a way to conceive and remember them, things that had been taught to them and brought through the ages.
Speaker 1:Right, it's observations of historical teaching, learning that they acquired over time. And culture, civilization is built one on top of another, where you learn from the previous generations, and I remember even, uh, there was an art, there was a column by mike royko who I I just really enjoyed reading yes, what did I? Criticize the younger generation at that time.
Speaker 1:This is probably 50 years ago yeah, he was good though the younger people think that the world was created when they were born. Yeah, because they want to remake everything from the time that they were born and they don't learn anything from the past. And that's really what these virtues are. Important is that they go back into prehistory, that these are things that people learned, that are required for a civilization to function, and even in our own constitution, john Adams said that without a moral and religious culture, our constitution means nothing. And really what I've seen in the last over 50 years that I've been involved in law enforcement is a breakdown of the virtues of our whole culture. That just doesn't exist. People don't see them as important anymore, and so you see rising indifference, rising crime, there's an increase in the sexual exploitation of children. There's all these terrible things that are going on because we have lost our the value of our virtues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is just. You know we're spiritual beings. We keep forgetting this. You know we're embodied spirits and and you know our bodies, our person, the who we are, manifests either good or evil in the world. When we start to look around the world and we see the evil going out there, you know kids are taught today that it's the oppressor-oppressed thing, right, critical race theory. You know, I am a Caucasian and I'm an oppressor and there's nothing I can do about it. And the poor minority student learns that he's being oppressed and there's nothing he can do about it. When in reality all that good and evil starts in the human heart. Other than nature, other than the natural occurrences, we see almost all of the evil in the world started in the individual human heart.
Speaker 2:Unless you instill these virtues in the individual child, in the parent, et cetera, who models, who should be modeling these things? We don't know right from wrong. And Tom, et cetera, who models, who should be modeling these things? We don't know right from wrong. And Tom, when we see these things, you see the Democrats, because they totally have no actual virtues that they live by.
Speaker 2:And I'm generalizing here, but in essence, what we see, they have no answer. They have no answer to the violence. They have no answer to the open borders. They have no answer to the violence. They have no answer to the open borders. They have no answer to the homelessness, because they don't instill these virtues. They don't have them themselves and they don't instill them into the rest of us through their modeling and through the laws that they bring through. So the laws have no meaning and purpose. And so, at the end of the day, you see a decline in Western civilization. You see it all over Europe, tom. They're ahead of us, but not by much. The Biden administration sure did a good job of trying to catch up with the decadence of Western civilization as a whole, didn't?
Speaker 1:they? Well, yeah, and part of the reason for that is our virtues decline the more government has to control things that are going on, and so the government is itself undermining the virtues that are natural to us. Even in the Bible, it's taught that God has instilled in our heart an understanding of the difference between right and wrong. So these virtues are inherent in us that we can recognize what's right, we can recognize what's wrong, we know that we need to be courageous in order to overcome fear, and these are all things that we already know. But the government doesn't want us to have these virtues, because that limits their ability to control us. That's what you see in Europe is that the more society breaks down, the more government enters into a point of control or into a— what they're trying to set up the culture so that they have the ability to tell everybody what to do at all times.
Speaker 2:And then you know, the first way to do that is break down the family right. And so, again, this is our point for today is that parents need to pass this down. There's a great reading at Exodus and they are told the Jewish people are talking about the Passover right, so their exodus out of slavery, and all these plagues come. And so one of the last ones, the Pharaoh still wouldn't let his people go. So one of the last ones is the avenging angel is going to come over and they have to put blood from a sacrifice around their door right their lentil. And so, anyways, you pass the story down that the avenging angel passed over us and smited our enemies, and we need to pass this down from generation to generation and instill these values right, the commandments, the values, how to live properly. Well, that's what we stopped doing, tom. We stopped passing these values, these virtues, as you're bringing up down to our kids, and so let's define them really quick. So we're talking again about prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, and, tom, I'll just say it real quick and then fill in if you want to.
Speaker 2:I always think of prudence as a wisdom right, a way to discern, a way to decide. Justice is, you know what we owe each other. You know what do I owe you as a human being. What do we owe the government? What does the government own us in essence? Fortitude, like you said right before we came on and you just alluded to again. It's courage in essence. Perseverance, courage and then temperance, that God gives us the beauty of sexuality and food and all these things. But we have to know that God gives it to us not as an addict that's trying to fill ourselves up with these things, but as something to enjoy, always giving the glory and the thanks to God. And if we take those things out, tom, it's a mess, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Right and courage. Without courage all the other, you can't carry out any of the other virtues. You have to have courage to do it. But you know, there's a scene in Gladiator that I really liked, before they start the battle and Maximus tells his troops. He says what we do in this life echoes in eternity. And that actually is what we believe as Christians as well. What we do here echoes in eternity. And what we don, what we believe as Christians as well, what we do here, echoes in eternity.
Speaker 1:And what we don't do here right what we don't do what.
Speaker 1:We don't do what we don't has an impact on that as well, and I think parents need to focus on developing these virtues in their children intentionally, because they're not being taught in schools anymore. Virtues in their children, intentionally because they're not being taught in schools anymore. Simply, they're being replaced by activism, by CRT DEI, all these kind of SEL, all this stuff that is really ancillary from the virtues that they're trying to create, a morality without any foundation. That morality is depending on what you believe and what truth is, and your truth and my truth. These are all contrary to building and instilling in children the virtues that the Bible calls us to disciple our children in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and probably I'll make two comments on that. First of all, you know, parents were always supposed to be the primary educators of their children. It was only in recent history that we've totally abdicated this to these broken school systems. We should have been teaching these things at home anyways. We should be helping our kids learn to read and stuff anyways, While you're going to be doing these things, grit the great books, get the great books, because this is the easiest way to instill these, these virtues down.
Speaker 2:And that's my second thing find some great children's books. I I was showing you, tom, this, this is for fourth and fifth graders these greek myths and and and it's these wonderful stories. Every story in here is going to be talking about one of those virtues you know St George and the Dragon wonderful book about, again, about courage, just like you said. And what does a hero look like and what is worth fighting for? I have one I really love and I'll show you just one more real, quick Tom is this Quiltmaker's Gift.
Speaker 2:Quick, tom is this Quiltmaker's Gift and it's about this king, that's just. He's a hoarder of all these precious things and it's a story about how this old quiltmaker gets him and turns his heart around and he starts giving things away and finds joy in that. So we're modeling and telling stories about all these beautiful attributes and these virtues that you're talking about, and then this is how we discuss it with our kids through beautiful stories, through these, and they're all over. There's tons of these wonderful books like this Tom Aesop's Tables, fables. We talked about the Chronicles of Narnia, cs Lewis's books in the past.
Speaker 2:These are wonderful, wonderful books right.
Speaker 1:Well, books by Hans Christian Andersen, s Lewis's books in the past. These are wonderful, wonderful books, right? Well, books by Hans Christian Anderson, yes, and you know there's a lot of these things that are out there that gives parents an opportunity to talk to kids, not to try to say teach them. Well, here's what prudence means. No, it's the result of what these you know what they're doing you say this shows somebody that cares about doing the right thing.
Speaker 1:This shows somebody with discernment this shows. Look at the courage this person has. Don't you want to be like them? I remember even the stories that my father told me when he was a pilot during World War II. He used to tell these stories about his missions. He used to fly airplanes over Burma and when I was a little kid, I wanted to be just like him. He had such his stories, displayed such courage of him and his other friends over there. I thought, man, I want to be like that. I want to have that kind of courage.
Speaker 2:Yeah and we instill these things when people, when kids, are young, then they look around and they see some kid getting bullied and they will stand up for those kids. Or see some kid that's lonely in the cafeteria and they learn to maybe say hi to them or be kind to them or at least not bully them themselves. So all these things are learned through these stories that we pass down, through these things that we talk about at the kitchen table. My own son was in.
Speaker 1:He was in when he was on the school bus. We were told later that he stepped in when the kid was being bullied and he he prevented the kid from being bullied and from that point on he always sat with him to make sure he'd nobody messed with him again. Isn't that beautiful. I mean that makes a dad proud. Right yeah, that makes a dad proud.
Speaker 2:But unless that was modeled at home, a kid will sit there and know that he probably should do something. But unless it's been modeled at home, they usually don't, you know, naturally have the courage just to stand up and do that. But once it's modeled at home, once they hear the stories, it clicks and they go. Yeah, you know what? I can't let that go on. You know, and those are beautiful things, you know, and you know we're all afraid to. You know to pass, or we don't know how many millennial parents that I know don't know these things. They've not got these passed on, tom.
Speaker 2:So get some children's books right at the end of the day, get some great children's books. Start to share this, start to talk about it with your family, pray together at mealtime and stuff. Because you know, in order to really walk out and practice these virtues, you're going to need not only courage, but you're going to need courage from God. Right, you're going to need what we call grace, and that grace is really. You know this picture here, tom.
Speaker 2:It's called the image of the divine mercy, and Jesus talks about the grace, and that's when he got hit with the lance, and the water and the blood come out and he said you know, when you look at this image, remember that this is passing through you, this power, this grace, right? The white is baptism and then confession, right, this cleansing of our sins so that we can be united with Christ. And the red is his blood, and so we actually take this in right and he gives us the grace to live out these virtues. So bring prayer in while you're doing these books, and I think you got a great recipe to begin with Thomas, any last thoughts.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, it doesn't stop either, because my kids are in their late forties and I still talk to them about the books they read and the things that they see. Wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 2:How can they be in their late 40s, Tom? There's no way that you're old enough to have kids in their late 40s.
Speaker 1:Impossible. My oldest is 50. This year.
Speaker 2:That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. You're getting old, my friend, hey, listen, finish that statement, though. So your daughter, still to today, does what?
Speaker 1:Well, I still talk to my daughter about books. She's in a in a women's book club and very often she'll have me read the book too and contribute what you know commentary on it. So it's still. It's still applies, even when they get older.
Speaker 2:See, you start those habits right and now you open up a dialogue that she feels comfortable talking to you all these years, and probably, Tom, as we close up here, let's see, the obvious advantage to this is you put that stupid phone down and when you're sitting at the dinner table now and you read this book before you even had dinner, maybe throw the baseball around a little bit in between. Now you're sitting down for dinner and nobody's looking at the phones. You're talking about these concepts and I did the same thing at my house, you know, and later on these discussions continue because we're used to talking to one another. It's really a big difference, Tom. The dynamics.
Speaker 2:Well, I've recommended books to my daughter's book club too difference Tom the dynamics.
Speaker 1:Well, I've recommended books to my daughter's book club too. It's the one I mentioned to you before. It says Hedy's Folly, about Hedy Lamarr and how she was. You know, the most beautiful woman in the world and an actress and everything, but she also was an inventor and she was. She was helping blowing up the Germans and the Japanese during World War II.
Speaker 2:Nobody knew about it. Unbelievable, isn't that something?
Speaker 1:It was a fascinating story, so you still maintain a lifelong ability to communicate with your kids when you start talking to them about these things at an early age.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's exactly why the government you know, the Biden administration, the government, you know, here in the United States and across Europe, that's why they wanted to take these things out, because they'd rather have you staring at those phones, they'd rather have a weak relationship between parents and children. And it confused, like you said, it confused citizenry, where we don't have these morals and values and we allow the government to take over. And we were right there, tom. Without that Trump hat right there, you know, you and I would have been not only banned from libraries, like we have been, but we'd be probably have lawsuits against us. And so they tie you up in court. And if you're not rich, you know, you get a couple of lawsuits against you and it really ruins your. You know your wife starts looking at you and say, jack Tom, if you guys don't shut up, I'm leaving you Right.
Speaker 1:So so, so we were almost there we were very the thing. The thing is that the all the executive orders and laws aren't going to, aren't going to change anything unless people start instilling the right values in their children again, because as of now, it's not being done.
Speaker 2:No, and and that's a great point, right, Donald Trump, uh, JD Vance, that cabinet. They only gave us a window, and if we don't perk it up right now, if we don't step into this battle right now, in two or three or four years, they could all go away and and and. If the citizen three doesn't stand up and promote what's true, good and beautiful in the world and these great virtues, Tom, we've wasted this whole opportunity, and so parents need to go out today and get those great books and take it from there and start to talk to them. And these are interesting books too I used to look forward to and.
Speaker 2:I still do today with my grandkids look forward to reading these things they're awesome and then getting their reaction from them. You know so good stuff, thomas. Yeah, good to be with you. Gotta go. Thanks everybody. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you again later bye.