Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (25 page)

And so I will drive a freedom-and-prosperity train from all parts of the nation to Washington. I will call it the Liberty Express. Conservatives will be on board, of course. Then we will stop and invite soccer moms to join us, and the women concerned about their children and families. And then men without jobs or who are worried about their jobs. We will include the hardworking, sometimes neglected singles, because they are vital and welcome in the family of community and country. We will stop too for African Americans, who share our vision of faith and family, who are seeking true hope. And Hispanics as well, hardworking values voters who will also want to come aboard. And Asian Americans and all the minorities in this ethnically diverse country of ours, all those who look with a hope for the day when a change will come. Get ready: Better days are ahead. Even before we get to Washington, we'll set our job-creating/economic-growing/government-reforming agenda in motion.

Together we can do this. We can come together and stick together as we renew our nation. A plan for America's renewal. As the great Daniel Webster declared as he commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Bunker Hill, we must always be “one cause, one country, one heart.”

And of course, we will pray. As Abraham Lincoln said, the issue isn't whether God is on our side; the issue is that we are on God's side. That's my prayerful hope. And so, in the spirit of our great president, I have faith that right makes might. And in that faith I will, to the very end, dare to do my duty for God and country.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank Marcus, who has been with me every step of the way, over thirty-three wonderful years. And I would like to thank my five biological children and my twenty-three foster children. I love you all. You have given me both joy and strength. It's been said that love can be divided endlessly and yet still not diminish. That's certainly been true for me.

I would also like to thank my parents and my grandparents, all of whom worked so hard, gave me so much—and asked for so little in return. Their example, their work ethic, and their wisdom forged the core of conviction that guides me to this day. And I thank my siblings, who have always been friends as well as beloved family. I must also express gratitude to my ancestors, including the Munsons, whose story has provided inspiration to me, more than 150 years after they first came to Iowa from Norway. I may never know the stories of others in my family, but I realize that they all contributed, in their way, to weaving the fabric of this country—a fabric both durable and wondrous.

I also thank God for the many generations who built our nation, beginning with the founding men and women who gave us this land of liberty and opportunity. It is their example over the centuries—from brilliant vision to heroic sacrifice to quiet duty—that inspires me to fight in my own time for a return to greatness under the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues, my co-workers and co-laborers—all those whom I have been blessed enough to know and to work with. So many of you have helped me, and mentored me, on causes great and small. I have listened to your voices, I have read your writings, and I have derived strength from your deeds. From campaigns to capitals, I have been proud to know you—and you have contributed greatly. And, of course, I must thank the people who have trusted me with their votes and their support. I am honored and humbled, as well as grateful, and will strive always to earn your continued trust and confidence.

And thanks also to Alex Hoyt and Adrian Zackheim, who first saw I had ideas that I could share with the nation. So thanks also to the whole team at Sentinel, Emily Angell, Jackie Burke, Tricia Conley, Susan Petersen Kennedy, Tiffany Liao, Noirin Lucas, Allison McLean, Eric Meyers, Joe Perez, David Shanks, and Will Weisser.

And thanks also to my research and writing partner, Jim Pinkerton, who helped me put onto these pages my memories, my reflections, and my goals.

But I must return once again to acknowledge and honor our country—to give thanks to this beacon of hope, these United States of America, this sanctuary for so many who have yearned to breathe free. A long time ago, in a little corner of the heartland, some sturdy pioneers spoke for all of us when they described the young nation as “this fertile land, where freedom and equality prevail in civil and religious affairs.” In counting their blessings as more wonderful than riches, they were inspired and motivated to help build the American Story.

With God's grace, may it always be so.

APPENDIX:

Goals 2000 in the Context of a Global Power Grab

AS discussed in chapter 8, the origins of Goals 2000 and other similar U.S. legislation can be seen in international agreements, such as “The World Declaration on Education for All,” proclaimed at a 1990 United Nations conference in Jomtien, Thailand. That document, building on numerous previous documents generated by myriad UN conclaves—and augmented by myriad more documents since—is open in its declared ambition to remake the nations of the world on a vast scale. Few Americans know about this world government “mission creep”—the federal government certainly hasn't told them—but as we shall see, the influence of the international education bureaucracy is reshaping American public schools.

For example, Article VIII of the UN's “Education for All” tells us that education, by itself, isn't good enough; society, too, has to change: “Supportive policies in the social, cultural, and economic sectors are required in order to realize the full provision and utilization of basic education for individual and societal improvement.” In other words, society has to be remade to meet bureaucratic specifications—and not just those of national bureaucrats, but those of international bureaucrats as well. Moreover, Article IX puts some mobilizing muscle behind these goals: “If the basic learning needs of all are to be met through a much broader scope of action than in the past, it will be essential to mobilize existing and new financial and human resources, public, private and voluntary.” Now here's an oxymoron for you:
mobilize voluntary resources.
Well, what if those “resources”—that is, you and me and everyone else—don't volunteer to be “mobilized” by some nascent world government? And what do you do when you are “mobilized” anyway? Think about it: It's hard enough to fight city hall. It's even harder to fight your state capital. And harder still to fight Washington, D.C. So how are you going to fight some ruling bureaucracy in another country, a far-away institution that might not even acknowledge your legal standing to put up a fight? By now, we are starting to see more clearly that “education” is just the thin edge of the wedge for a remaking of the world. And here's another one: Article X, “Strengthening International Solidarity”; the first lines of this article read, “Meeting basic learning needs constitutes a common and universal human responsibility. It requires international solidarity and equitable and fair economic relations in order to redress existing economic disparities.” In other words, “education for all” isn't really about education; it's about establishing a new international world economic order to fix “existing economic disparities.”

Some will say, of course, that these are just words—word castles erected by expense-accounted bureaucrats with too much time on their hands, living out a fantasy life of jargon as they junket their way around the globe. But actually, no; these ideas have big consequences. Amid all this word piling, we can see the antecedents to the Goals 2000 legislation that was, in fact, enacted by the U.S. Congress just four years after the Jomtien conference. That is, in both the UN document and the U.S. document, we see the same bureaucratic exhortation, the same commitment to greater government funding, and the same commitment to government power at the expense of local autonomy. (The National Education Goals [Section 102] of Goals 2000 is included at the end of this appendix.) The added twist, of course, is that once the decision-making power goes international, codified in obscure agreements and treaties, it is then beyond the reach of Americans, who are never consulted in these decisions and would certainly never approve of them if they were. There's a term for this phenomenon: “democracy deficit.” That is, the bureaucrats in distant institutions make unaccountable decisions, and citizens and taxpayers find out about them only later. This phenomenon has been happening in Europe under the European Union for years as central planners gather power into Brussels and then seek to impose liberal secular homogenization upon the Continent as a whole. As a most flagrant recent example, people across Europe have awakened to discover that some minister in Frankfurt has just written a huge check to bail out some wastrel government.

This democracy deficit is evident here in the United States, too: American judges now freely cite foreign law in their decisions, and the Environmental Protection Agency—joined by an archipelago of other bureaucratic entities scattered across the federal government—seeks to bend America to rules written by international environmental authorities, most egregiously, in the area of climate change. These legal precedents are ominous to American sovereignty—but that's not an accident, that's the goal. And what if America's legal sovereignty and economic viability are crushed under the weight of international rule making? A small price to pay, the bureaucrats will answer, for global justice. And besides, we know full well that the bureaucrats always seem to flourish, no matter what the state of the economy.

One expert who saw early on this larger context for education policy was my fellow Minnesotan Allen Quist. Decades ago, Allen saw that the true global source of trendy new education policy lay in the central-planning mind-set of international bureaucrats. He asked: “Are we doing what's right for kids? Or are we doing what's right for central planners? Who is calling the shots? Is it school boards, cities, states, federal government, or international bodies? The struggle has never been about good education—it's been all about power.” The good fight against the international central planning of education had to start somewhere, and I am proud to say that we in Minnesota were at the forefront. After five years, we finally beat back the Profile of Learning, which was just one of many efforts to regiment children, and parents, according to the dictates of bureaucratic utopians.

Yet even so, as we have seen in the “No Child Left Behind” legislation of 2001, the same top-down education mind-set persists. And as Allen says, the “top” isn't Washington, D.C.; the top is actually international institutions, including the UN. So that's a fight that must continue into the future. It's a fight on behalf of all those who wish to see children educated in a properly structured school environment, guided under the leadership of parents and teachers, not bureaucrats.

Please take a look at the “National Education Goals” within Goals 2000 listed below. I think you will see the same ponderous bureaucratic style as in the international “Education for All” document—and the same ponderous bureaucratic mind-set. That is, children are, in effect, resources or inputs who must comport to a politically correct list of requirements, even as governments at all levels grow larger and stronger to “implement” these goals. I believe that if the American people knew where so much federal education “reform” was coming from, they would rise up and reject these bureaucratic dictates, reclaiming decision-making authority and restoring it to where it belongs—to taxpayers, parents, and students.