#1632 A Survival Guide for the Next Four Years

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Guest host David Horton and Clay discuss New Year’s resolutions. Never more important than at present. People across the political spectrum are nervous about the next years of American life. But what’s to be done? Clay offers several ways of coping—taking up a craft that involves one’s hands and not merely one’s brain, reading with discipline and purpose, learning from Aristotle’s dictum that wisdom is knowing which battles to fight and which to leave alone, and much more. Clay and David wind up quoting Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity prayer in unison. Read the complete works of your favorite author. And when things really go south, watch Leslie Nielsen films: Naked Gun, Airplane, Naked Gun 2 ½.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my friends. This is Clay Jenkinson. This is my introduction to this week's podcast. This is one of the most important programs that we've ever done. Everyone is freaked out. Even people who voted for President Trump are worried about where the country's headed. Everyone is anxious. They know this is going to be a nightmare series of
0:21.7	years that there's going to be terrible disruptions and colossal controversies and lawsuits and
0:27.8	probably violence and that's people across the spectrum. And of course the people on the left are
0:34.3	just totally reduced to rage and blubbering and threatening to leave the
0:39.6	country and so on. And so I wanted to do a program kind of based on a guide to the perplexed
0:46.3	E. Schumacher's book or, you know, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, or Voltaire's Candide,
0:52.9	or Reinhold Nebrid's Serenity Prayer. But I wanted to do a program
0:56.1	saying we can cope and we can use this as opportunity, each of us, to improve our lives, to be
1:02.6	better at what we are and do and say and represent. We should undertake a self-actualization program.
1:10.2	There are mechanisms for us to make the most of this situation,
1:16.2	and if everyone who is listening will do that, it will change the world.
1:20.8	You know, the change is not going to come from the top down,
1:23.7	the change is going to come from the bottom up,
1:26.4	and to the extent that each one of us
1:28.6	becomes an exemplum of a more enlightened way of looking at life, healthier, more vibrant,
1:36.5	more fit, more productive, more civil, we will be infinitely better off. And so I worked really hard to get ready for this program
1:48.2	because I'm so convinced that we need this that there's no point in just wringing our hands
1:54.4	or having a nervous collapse over this, that we have to have a plan and each one of us has to
2:00.6	have a plan to make the world
2:03.3	around us in whatever small way we can, a more enlightened world. And that's going to take
2:08.6	civility, it's going to take patience, it's going to take discipline and hard work, it's going
2:12.7	to take hard reading. And I offered my four-point plan, you know, you can go into mere escapism and just watch
	...

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