this is my first time at Liberty, although I've followed the progress over the many years

and I am very, very proud of what's going on at this university. And I actually have

some people that are very close to me who are students here, Hannah and Ben Walker.

Ben was actually named after me. And just the things that have been going on here represent,

I think, a lot to the country, and I want to talk a little bit today about how important

it is in your life to stand up for what you believe in.

You know, I've always only wanted to be a doctor. That was the only thing that really

interested me in life. When I was a small child I used to listen to the mission stories

in church and Sabbath school, they frequently featured missionary doctors, people who traveled

all over the world at great personal expense, sacrifice, to bring not only physical, but

mental and spiritual healing to people. It seemed to me like the most noble thing someone

could do, so when I was eight years old, I decided that I was going to be a missionary

doctor. And that was my dream until I was 13. At which time, having grown up in dire

poverty, I decided I would rather be rich, so at that point, missionary doctor was out,

and psychiatrist was in. Now I didn't know any psychiatrists, but on TV they seemed like

rich people. You know, they drove Jaguars. They lived in big fancy mansions, big plush

offices, and all they had to do is talk to crazy people all day. It seemed like I was

doing that anyways, so I said, "You know, this is going to work out extremely well!"

And I started reading Psychology Today, I was the local shrink in high school, everybody

brought me their problems. I would sit there and stroke my chin, say, "Tell me about your

momma." And I majored in psychology in college, did advanced psych in medical school, and

I was gung-ho! I was all ready to be a psychiatrist, and then I started meeting a bunch of psychiatrists.

Need I say more? I'm just kidding, some of my best friends are psychiatrists.

But what I discovered pretty quickly is what psychiatrists do in real life and what they

do on television are two completely different things. And they really are some of the more

intellectual and very important parts of the medical community but it really wasn't what

I wanted to do. I just said, "Lord, what is it that you really want me to do?" and I started

thinking about special gifts and talents. You know, God gives everybody special gifts

and talents. Everybody in here is better than everybody else at something. It's a matter

of figuring out what your gifts and talents are, and I realized that I had a lot of eye

hand coordination. I had the ability to think in three dimensions. I was a very careful

person. I never knocked things over and said "Oops," which is a good characteristic of

a brain surgeon by the way. I loved to dissect things, and so I said, "You would be a terrific

neurosurgeon." And really that's how I came up with that idea. It turned out to be obviously

the right choice for me but I think if you spend some time trying to get in contact with

those gifts that God gave you, and then think of careers that take advantage of that, as

opposed to just doing what your mom or you dad did or what your friends are doing, it,

I think, will make a tremendous difference in terms of how things turn out.

Now let me just take a brief moment for a disclaimer. Everybody makes disclaimers these

days, they says I sit on this board or that board, I'm associated with this organization

therefore you must take everything I say with a grain of salt. Well, what I've discovered

in recent years that it is very difficult to speak to a large group of people nowadays

without offending someone. Have you noticed that? When I was a kid growing up, "Sticks

and stone break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Do young people know that anymore?

I don't think so. Because now people walk around with their feelings on their shoulders,

waiting for somebody to say something. "Did you hear that?" And then they can't hear anything

else you say. I was talking to a group one time about the difference between a human

brain and a dog's brain, and a man got offended. He said, "You can't talk about dogs like that."

And then I was talking to a group about how the fashion industry has gotten young ladies

to think they are supposed to be so skinny, they look like they escaped from a concentration

camp. And you know, a Jewish man got offended. "You know," he said, "You can't mention concentration

camps!" He said, "That's way too sensitive. It would be as if I said something to you

about slavery." I said, "You cant talk about slavery all you want; doesn't bother me."

You know some people choose to get offended. So this is my disclaimer. It is not my intention

to offend anyone, and if anyone is offended, too bad. Because I've got to tell you, I do

not believe in political correctness and in fact, I believe that it is a highly destructive

force that is threatening to destroy our nation and you know a lot of the people who founded

this nation came here trying to escape from people who told them what they could say and

what they could think. And who are we, reintroducing it through the back door.

And really the emphasis should not be on unanimity of speech, or unanimity of thought, the emphasis

should be on learning how to be respectful of people you disagree. And if we can ever

learn that, I think we will be on our way to having a much stronger nation. And this

is something that we clearly are going to have to convey to the people who supposedly

run this nation who seem to have no concept of it whatsoever.

At any rate, there I was, you know I wanted to be a doctor but I wasn't a particularly

good student. My parents got divorced early on, and my mother only had a third grade education.

She worked very hard two or three jobs at a time as a domestic, cleaning other people's

houses because she didn't want to be on welfare, because she was very observant, and she noticed

no one she ever saw go on welfare came off of it. So she didn't want to go on it in the

first place. She had a very difficult life. Discovered after getting married at age 13

and moving to Tennessee with her husband to Detroit some years later she discovered he

was a bigamist and I remember telling that story at the University of Utah graduation

nobody thought it was that strange. See, that probably offended somebody.

But you know, with all the things that happened in her life, she never felt sorry for herself.

And I think that was a good thing. The problem was she never felt sorry for us either. There

was never any excuse we could give that was good enough. She would always say, "Do you

have a brain?" and if the answer to that was, "yes," then she would say, "Well, it doesn't

really mater what John, or Mary, or Susan, or Robert or anybody else did, you could've

thought your way out of it." And you know when people don't accept your excuses, pretty

soon, you stop looking for excuses and you start looking solutions, and I think it made

all the difference in the world.

At any rate, I was a terrible student, probably the worst student you can ever imagine. In

fact, my nickname was, "dummy." That's what everybody called me. They enjoyed the fact

that I was in the classroom, though. And the reason is I was what is called the, "safety

net." You never had to worry about getting the lowest mark on a test as long as I was

there. I just kind of gave up on myself. I really didn't think that I was very smart.

Fortunately, my mother would not give up. She prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom

to know what to do. How could she get her young son to understand the importance of

intellectual development? You know what? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion,

my brother and I didn't think it was all that wise, because it was to turn off the TV set.

Now what kind of wisdom is that? As far as we were concerned, that was child abuse, but

she said we could only watch two or three TV programs during the week, and with all

that spare time we had to read two books apiece from the Detroit Public Library and submit

to her written book reports, which she couldn't read, but we didn't know that. She put little

check marks and highlights and underlines and stuff, and we thought she was reading

them, but she wasn't. But you know, I hated it. Everybody else was

outside having fun, but after a few weeks, I actually began to enjoy reading those books

because we were desperately poor, but it didn't cost anything to get a book out of the library.

And between the covers of those books, I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do

anything. I'd begin to imagine myself in laboratories conducting experiments, looking through telescopes

and discovering new galaxies, and microscopes, microcosms. And I began to know things that

nobody else knew. And I started reading about animals and then plants and then rocks. And

pretty soon I could identify virtually any rock, tell you where it came from, how it

was formed. Still in the fifth grade, still a dummy. And one day the science teacher walked

in and he held up a big black shiny rock and he said, "Can anybody tell me what this is?"

Well now, I never raised my hand. I never answered any questions. So, I waited for one

of the smart kids to raise their hand. And nobody did. So, I waited for one of the dumb

kids to raise their hand, and nobody did. So, up went my hand. Everybody turned around.

They couldn't believe it. Carson's got his hand up! Oh, this is gonna be good. They were

ready. And the teacher was so shocked, and he said "Benjamin?" I said, "Mr. Jake, that's

obsidian." And there was silence in the room. Because it sounded good. Nobody knew whether

it was right or wrong. They didn't know whether they should be laughing or whether they should

be impressed, and finally Mr. Jake broke the silence and said, "That's right, that is obsidian!"

and I said, "You know, obsidian is formed after a volcanic eruption and the lava flows

down and hits the water, there's a super-cooling process, elements coalesce, air forces out,

the surface glazes over." They were all staring at me. They could not believe all of this

geological information spewing forth from the mouth of the dummy. But I was perhaps

the most amazed person, because it dawned on me at that moment that I was no dummy at

all. I said the reason you knew those answers is because you were reading the books. What

if you read books about all your subjects? Can you imagine the effect? And from that

point on, no book was safe from my grasp. I read everything I could get my hands on.

If I had five minutes, I was reading a book. Waiting for the bus, reading a book, on the

bus, reading a book, in the bathroom, reading a book. At the kitchen table, my mom would

say, "Benjamin, put the book down and eat your food." It didn't matter, I was always

reading. And you know, within the space of a year and a half, I went from the bottom

of the class to the top of the class. Much to the consternation of all those students

that used to laugh and call me dummy, now the same ones were coming to me in the 7th

grade, and they were saying, "Benny, how do you work this problem?" and I would say, "Sit

at my feet, youngster, while I instruct you." I was, perhaps, a little obnoxious, but it

sure felt good to say that to those turkeys.

But you know, the fact of the matter is, I had the same brain but just a very different

outlook. And when you think about it, you think about the brain that God has given you.

We were made in His image, and He's no dummy. You know, your brain has billions and billions

of neurons, hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than 2 million bits of

information in one second. It doesn't forget anything you've ever seen, or anything you've

ever heard, which is why it's important to make sure you don't put the wrong things in

there, because they will always impact upon you, subconsciously and consciously. But to

give you some idea of how complex your brain is, how many of you remember your birthday?

Let me just see your hand. I think it's unanimous.

Now, what did your brain have to do to respond to that question, almost instantly? Well first

of all, sound waves have to leave my lips, travel to the ear, enter you external auditory

meatus, travel down to the tympanic membrane, set up a vibratory force, which traveled across the

ossicles of the middle ear, to the oval and round windows, setting up a vibratory force

in the endolymph which mechanically distorted at the microcilia, converting mechanical energy

into electrical energy which traveled across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus

to the pontomedullary junction, from there to the superior olivary nucleus, ascending

bilaterally at the brainstem, through the lateral meniscus to the inferior colliculus and the nuclei,

across the lambic gradiation to the proceric temporal lobes to begin the alterior processes

to the frontal lobes coming out (unintelligible).... So you could raise your hand. Now, that, that's a

simplified version. Now see how many rap singers can do that.

If your brain can do all that, and you barely have to even think about it, what is your

brain capable of if you actually put your mind to something? It really is quite daunting

when you stop to think about it. And you know, our nation right now is in a bit of trouble

intellectually, because people don't think. People are not knowledgeable. The founders

of our nation said that our system of government could only succeed with a well-educated populous.

And they said once the populous becomes ignorant, they become easily lead by slick politicians

and our system of government will fail. It's a very interesting prediction that was going

on there. And you know, I want you to think about this.

There was a survey done some years ago looking at the ability of 8th grade equivalence in

22 nations to solve so-called complex math and science problems. We were one of the 22

nations. We came in number 21 out of 22, and we barely beat our 22. It was neck and neck.

Couple that with the fact that we produce only 70,000 a year in this country, 40% of

whom are foreigners, China produces 400,000 engineers a year. 30% of people who enter

high school in this country do not graduate from high school, and this is the information

age. This is the age of technology, so you can see, we have a very significant problem.