My name is nathan but 3 and i will be your host for an hour here. I want to welcome everybody who is watching on booktv to the southern festival of books sponsored by humanities tennessee. I want to say thank you to all those who donate, your individual donations make this event possible. Thank you very much. If you would like to make a donation see me afterwards and i can introduce you to the right people who would love to talk to you. A little bit of housekeeping. I will going to introduce our offer Erick Erickson and Erick Erickson will speak a little bit and read through his book and we will open the floor to questions. If you do have a question, we are live on booktv so we want the audience at home to hear. Erick erickson is the popular host of atlantas evening news, 95. 5 fm and a. M. 750, former editor of red states. His website, the resurgent, he is a Fox News Contributor who at the atlantic called the most powerful conservative in America Today. He studied Political Science and history of university and earned a law degree at Walter F George school. He lives in georgia with his family. In late 2016 he and his wife were diagnosed with grave medical conditions. In the midst of his wifes battle with cancer he was rushed to the hospital, potentially fatal influx of blood clots and leaving permanent scarring. Facing this dual health scare and contemplating his mortality he published an unusual piece to his website which gets more than 2. 8 Million Viewers a month. Erick erickson fsa written in the form of a letter to his children was like anything he had ever published before. It was not about washing intrigue or the days news which he wrote about values and enduring lessons he would want his children to live by even if he were no longer with. The piece went viral with overwhelming response that stretched beyond Erick Erickson a fan breaks. His as it was contrasted with the values of donald trump writing Erick Erickson and his wife are both living lives of love, faith, devotion and service. Both have ultimate confidence in the goodness of creation and their grace filled place in it. You may share that faith or not but Erick Erickson is living and attached life emotionally, spiritually, morally and communally. Welcome Erick Erickson. [applause] if i am going to read i probably need a copy. I forgot to bring one. Thank you all for having me. Thanks to those of you watching live. My name is Erick Erickson. I am from a rural part of louisiana. When i was 5 years old my dads company gave him a choice, moved to dubai or find a new job. When i was little we moved to the middle east and lived there for ten years. The cool part about growing up there is every three months we had to leave the country to get a visa and my Dads Committee would tell us to go somewhere. I have been to more countries than states. I have been to montana to perform a wedding. So far no divorces and i have seen montana but never seen wyoming or idaho, never been into the Rocky Mountains before or the west coast. The experience traveling abroad, my kids never have that experience. In the middle east in the 1980s during the iran iraq war multiple times having people try to blow our school up having bomb threats called in for various organizations and sandwiches open to look for explosives as we walk to school in the morning. We lived in an open neighborhood and to move home where overseas we had a lot of camel racing and politics became a connection to me. And i became a political junkie, and survived the david duke race where my parents had to vote for the crook and it is important. Going to college in georgia i met my wife and made a home with the law School Practice for five years and one day one of the partners of my law firm asked do you know what deficit of a dumbass is . I said no. He said you. So i did. Friend of mine started the website red state and put me in charge of it and things exploded. In 2009 cnn called and asked if i wanted a job, i had a friend who had to put up with me for three years at cnn and after the 2012 election moved over to fox where i have been since and my life has revolved around politics day in and day out. My wife is not political at all. We were in college together and i got to drive in jack kemps motorcade while he and bob dole were running and called my wife and a friend and told her what was happening and she said that is great but who is jack kemp . He is running for Vice President. She was silent for a minute and said you have to campaign to be Vice President of the university . Not a political creature at all. We dont discuss politics at home. I have in the past several years become more committed to my favorite. Started going to seminary largely because i talk about faith and culture on my Radio Program in atlanta and started getting a lot of smaller churches. They would say pastor is going to be gone could you fill in . I would say no because i had never been to seminary. Getting so many requests i figured it was time to go to seminary. They found out i was going to reform seminary and none of them have called since. But i stayed going to seminary. I love it. I take a class a semester. When i first went the president of the seminary took me to lunch and said you have to make me a promise before you go to seminary. I said okay, what . Makes a promise and i will tell you what you are promising. So i made the promise. He said dont go to seminary. I said how is this going to work . I already paid tuition. He said you can take classes but if you go to seminary you will start sounding like that on the radio. Come take classes but dont get in the mindset of being a seminarian or you will sell like on the radio and the ratings will take. I go to class, i take classes, theological classes and working through the books eventually i will have a degree but i have enjoyed it. In the process i realized more and more realized my politics and my faith were budding heads and i needed to do a better job reconciling my politics to my faith instead of my faith to politics and this past year i saw many friends choose the opposite way of trying to conform their faith to politics instead of the other way around. Lost a number of friends along the way. We had people show up on our front porch to threaten us because i wrote a piece as a committed christian and conservative i just cant support donald trump for president. I was an elected president and wasnt going to vote for him. We had people show up at our doorstep, armed guards at our house for three months lose my kids were yelled at the Grocery Store by a man who wanted them to know their father was destroying their lives and destroying the country and they needed to do something. They would come home from school in tears because kids would ask that id been shot or was i going to be shot . Their parents hated me and they needed to know it. It was hard on the family. When this went on i was having a harder time breathing, decided to get back in shape. I couldnt keep up and hit 40, i am getting old and i thought it was allergies and then i didnt know what it was. Finally in mid april 2016 with the stress of all this deciding it was just stress making it harder to breathe i was out of breath, laying my head on the pillow and it left me out of breath rolling over, waking up, gasping and maybe go to the doctor. She had my laptop, took away my microphone and made me go to the doctor. Next thing i knew i was being wheeled into a hospital, as they were pushing me into the machine to scan my lungs, my wife got a call on her cell phone and the waiting room from doctors in the mayo clinic who thought she needed to have her lungs checked. As i got out of the ct scan the technicians are not supposed to tell you anything. This young man comes in and doesnt want to make eye contact with me, should i strap him down . I just laughed, he literally put his hand on my chest, please dont move, you should be dead and they start stripping me down, and rush me into an icu and they have my skin up on the board and putting me in a room and the doctor on call, i can tell hes looking at the scan, have you taken bodies to the morgue yet . My blood oxygen level was below 90 and i had more blood clots in my lungs and they could count. I had yet to see a doctor since then who has looked at me and they all look at me and say you are supposed to be dead. I had blood clots in my lungs right now. Their old ones, not new. My wife flies out to arizona, im not allowed to travel on a plane and they diagnosed her with lung cancer. She takes a tiny pill every day and as long as the pill works she is fine. We go for scans every 3 months and our life is normal every three months, next on halloween and as long as the medicine works she is fine. Eventually the medicine will stop working and we hope they will create another medicine. The news came out the last couple weeks, every 24 months it is an amazing, this cancer that every 24 months mutates on cycle, the same mutation and they have to keep up with the development of the medicines. Protesters at the house, my life revolves around politics, we dont talk about it in the house and we find other things to talk about. And if something had really happened, what i wanted them to know about god, what i wanted them to know about me, the bad things ive done and the good things. At my kid at school theres a running joke, an example of googleing you never know what will come up. Some very true and one not and i wanted to write to my kids about the bad things i have done it good things and the regrets that i have of the bad things i have done and why they should listen to me because i have done those things and learned my lesson and Favorite Recipes and if i die before that, how would they make the cinnamon roll. And make the gumbos. Not that they eat that, full confession make it there into chicken the guts other than cinnamon rolls, and what lessons what i want them to know . How would i want them to know about the way i was raised, i start writing these down and appease on my website took on a life of its own after david brooks mentioned it in contrast to the president s values at the time of the access Hollywood Tape coming out, contrasted what he thought was the president s values with mine and the way the president surrounded him with people the way i have, and it was the easiest book i have ever written, i have written three, one of them is probably worth getting the first is not. This one was the most personable and some of the lessons particularly as a practicing christian, and going to be hostile, how to navigate a world that seems upside down from their perspective. How do they reconcile being in the world with of the world . I want them to know they need to do what is right even when it is not liked. I want them to find their selfworth with the likes they get on instagram, that is judging their selfworth based on what other people think of them. I want them to get their selfworth from being ethical people. I want them to know their neighbor which is the other reason, i have found particularly among my political friends on both sides of the aisle that we create for ourselves our own communities online and everyone in our Community Looks exactly like us, we share the same thoughts, nothing is a surprise to us. We dont know the person in the apartment next door are the house down the street, we dont Pay Attention to the homeless man on the bridge, someone else in the community, we dont have this because it is all online and when do you get sick and think youre going to die and you realize it is not our facebook friends bringing us meals but our Church Friends with a person across the street who heard about the situation as we need to know our nextdoor neighbor, we need to know about the person down the street who has problems and needs help, prayer, we need to bring into our home and have around our Kitchen Table people from our church to see other people share our values but need to bring in the people we dont know but want to know who may not share our values but show our kids we should be able to find Common Ground as people with people who disagree on politics. Lessons i learned for three years, i grew up watching in dubai, the American News network, people like james carville, they were the bad guys. They were on the other side of the aisle. I adore them. And we were rooting for the saints and we still root for them. To find Common Ground. What can we Henry Kissinger said, they are so menial, seems like so Many Political fights are so nasty because they are so meaningless, neither side changes much of anything these days but we have the power within ourselves to change our communities by getting to know the people by helping the person next door when they cant help themselves, hoping maybe but not expecting they can help us one day when we need help, showing grace to people who dont show us grace, and friends with people who dont want to be our friends. That is what i want for my kids. If nothing else i want them to be a better person that i was and that is the aspiration of everyone for their children to be better than they are. Those are the reasons i wrote this. The last chapter as i was writing the first eight chapters i make lists of all the recipes i need to include but all the things i want them to know that i wasnt sure i could work in somewhere else and the last chapter became my version of proverbs come all the pieces of advice my dad gave me growing up like dont worry about the laundry tax, no one can read them. My personal favorite device was to after a fight. A days drive from my house, two hours, and my wife is taller than me with a shotgun. Those are the reasons why so i will read you a little bit of this. I want to write a chapter what i was going through at the moment i wrote the chapter and the title of it needs to be the theology of suffering. That is what i was dwelling on and no one is going to read a chapter entitled the theology of the it is come up with a better name. The title of this chapter, summer in the south, it is going on as i am writing the chapter in real time. Here is what is happening as i write this, 7 days ago, in surgery having his tonsils removed, my 8yearold, 5 days ago my wife had surgery to reattach her retina. For the last week i have gotten up at midnight, 4 00 in the morning at 6 00 in the morning to give Pain Medicine. For the first few days kristi had to have Pain Medicine too. My inlaws stayed with us for the week. Stayed up through the night, did the laundry and helps with homework while taking care of gunner. I still had my radio show to do in the evening. I stayed up till midnight to give gunnar his first dose of medicine doing as much work as i could including writing this. Every time i wake gunnar up, he screams and fights for close to 20 minutes. He will spit out the medicine multiple times and we go through multiple shirts and he will wear down and submit. Not sure there is a better analogy to god than to know that im dad to paraphrase the scripture. What my kids do not see is maced dagan up wiping tears out of my eyes. It hurts to me my wife and kids and pain. Gunners screams are so terrible he cannot talk, holds his throat with his hands and tries to cover his ears with his elbows. I knew the doctor said his ears would hurt, had no idea how badly it would hurt. People are trying to sterilize themselves from pain like this. They want to shield themselves. I want to shield my wife from pain. Pain is part of the process. How do we appreciate joy if we had not known misery or pain. If nothing else theres a theology to pain and suffering. I have a preacher friend who tells the story about pain from an old church was three women had cancer. The first took an oral chemotherapy like my wife, had no nausea. The second woman took traditional chemotherapy, lost weight and her hair fell out. The third woman had done all of it and nothing worked, all she had was prepared to die. The first woman looked at the second and despite her pain was glad she kept her hair and figure. The second looked at the first about losing her hair was a better trade than being in pain and aching all the time. They looked at the third woman and realized that they were going through a rough patch at least their treatment was working. The third woman looked at the first and was glad to have been release of her struggle. When it was over, prepared to meet her make her. All three looked at another woman but lost her son in a bombing. They thought they had terrible struggles. They did not have to deal with the loss of losing a son. The fourth woman confided that she was solely herself and her son would never go through the struggles the other women went through or see his old mother struggle, it gave her piece. I cannot tell you how often i dwelled on this. I see my own life and familys life a change in our perspective with others suffering. Theres a couple not far from us to have a son. His older brother has the same illness and died. The nicest godly is to people. Edlund prays for them regularly and the moon is affected whether this family had good day or bad. She often wonders why god would do that to a family. We can look at our own struggles and think our children despite the pain and discomfort are with us. We can see how much more empathetic and sympathetic we are, not a post but a reality. We know from our own struggles a homecooked meal is in need, the best thing to do. Even though it is different we relate to other people suffering. I remember a preacher coming to sunday school after suffering and death. He tells of a lady in his church who was in a car wreck. People flooded her hospital room to comfort her as she was broken, bruised and crying and no one could console her. Her best friend walked in, climbed into the hospital, held the lady and cried, and many of us have not, to shield our souls for suffering and pain, losing an ability to related care for other people. Living requires suffering, steady flow of conformity takes away appreciation for the good times, takes away the good times. 16 years of marriage, 17 as of today, we had a few that we were not dealing with her health or mind. This was punctuated by one hospital and another, kristis neardeath experience, we had gunner and an easy time. We are back on hard times, prepared us for these hard times. I will leave you with the advice, in a chapter being from louisiana, and it is pronounced lagniappe, it means something extra. I won a tv show, to focus on how to get through a century hostile to the values. Sit down and break bread with them. I would call the show no one would watch it because they couldnt pronounce the name but it would be an awesome show. Gumbo made almost every day. In my chapter all the other things i want my kids to know i couldnt work into a chapter. Change your pillow every year and mattress every decade. Dont keep with people who can never admit they were wrong. They please and thank you but never expect others to reciprocate. Learn to break bread, the smell of yeast makes a house feel like home. Get married and stay married, happiness is not the goal of marriage, it is the byproduct of marriage, the goal of marriage is to be one in body and mind. And we need to do better ourselves. By a paper road atlas and learn to read it. Your kitchen is not your living room. Batman is the best superhero because he is not super, he is smart, superman is boring. Your grandfather likes to sandy gourmets orbital weasel never gets sucked into a jet engine, left but never be the weasel. Learn to use a gun, learn to flip it on, learn how to cook, then have friends over and do all the cooking, you will be amazed how few people do it these days. Directed at my son, remember to put the seat down. Learn to Foreign Language and travel to that country can always have one friend who can tell you, with yes men will destroy you. At the end of the day, pet your dog, the longest kiss to your spouse, your spouse is supposed to be with you forever and kids will move out you hope. Pumpkins are gourds, not spices, people who like Pumpkin Spice are weird and should not be trusted. Print your best photographs, the life lesson i learned, print your best photographs, delete your worst, the digital age allows us to accumulate so many memories on computers but we forget to print them out. Photographic memories are art, they capture my visit was for a fleeting moment so print out the pictures, share them, save them, dont let them collect digital dust forgot not old computer whose hard drive will go bad. Eat sweet potatoes. They are important. Understand there are beautiful things you may not like, even if you do not like, beethovens music is beautiful even if it is not your favorite. Fathers do not know everything but when our children are old they look like we know everything and are amazed by every other, during this time we shape our children for later in life. If we live able lie. If we are honest they will be honest. Wherever you are leave a place in better condition, public restroom is the major exception. Your home, school, community and planet should be improved. Leaving places better than you found them, there are those who think you are doing hartl wrong. Life is not fair, nor was it ever meant to be. Breaking the law is a sin but driving right at the speed limit is annoying, god will forgive you for speeding even if the Police Officer doesnt. Apologize have an Accountability Group who can be honest with you and you with them who can push you to be better than you are and they go on from there. My last paragraph of the book to my children, i will try to read this without crying. These thoughts, words, recipes, to cherish. Christy and i will die one day. We all will die. We do not know the future but i know these things are true and want my children to know they are true. I worry more than i should about my kids, my mind races to order stories, if it gets lost or snakebites, devlin going swimming, what if she falls in and around. I hope it is natural to be overprotective and over worried and overthink the dangers that lie ahead for our kids. I just want them to love god, love us and be kind, most of all your mother and i love you so much. We go into your room and watch you sleep. Iq part of the fabric from your favorite stuffed animal in your travel bag, and rub it in my hands to remind me of you. I can listen to it and here you. I love you, your mother does too. When the day comes you can no longer see a facetoface, we will be behind the veil of eternity watching and waiting to hold you once again. Thank you. [applause] im happy to take any questions you have. They told me you have to go to this microphone if you have any questions would otherwise i have to talk another 20 minutes because we are live on cspan. I am capable of talking. What i write in the book that i fell into everything i have ever done, one of the jobs i hated, i would have been great at being a lawyer but there are these things called client and they are often terrible and have problems with easy solutions and refused to go with the easy solution because they would rather sue the person who made the mad but after that when i was at red state someone from msnbc called and asked if i could be on msnbc and i did and years later av who wanted me was at cnn, and asked if i wanted a job at cnn and after that the local Radio Program director called me and asked if i could fill in for a man on the radio the next day and i said sure, i have been on the radio before and they remembered me. When i got to the station the next morning it turns out the individual was arrested in a crack house. The day turned into a week and the weeks turned into three months, expired Gift Certificate in the steakhouse. When i was there, the radio people in atlanta, one of them read my website, and asked if i wanted a weekend show. I said no. I was doing cnn, never saw my family to begin with and asked if i could fill in for herman cain and i filled in for herman cain and at the end of the show a group of people in suits came into the room and i thought that was the second they were going to say i was never allowed in the building again and instead they said herman cain is going to run for president. We dont want you to have a weekend show. Can you take his spot on the radio. I never had a job in radio before and they did not know that when they asked the question. They assumed i had been on radio more than the week i had been when they heard me. From 9 to midnight for three weeks until herman left and then 7 00 to 10 00 and 6 00 to 9 00, 5 to 7, the largest in the southeast, the most listened to radio show on any station regardless of format and spend two hours a day talking about whatever i want to talk about, having a wife and two kids at home. I stopped to check traffic, i have a captured audience, to figure out how to get home, not me, the traffic guy but i can talk about what i want to talk about and i found more than nobody wants to talk about. People are tired of the news of the day. We are not 9 months into this presidency and people are exhausted and doesnt matter what Political Party you are and people yelling at each other and the most inconsequential things on the planet are the most consequential things on the planet and getting online finding people who agree with them to get together and have cathartic experiences and community is collapsing around them. People losing their minds turning into the tv station where everybody agrees with us and coming out as a conservative in 2016, being a guest host for Rush Limbaugh saying i wasnt going to support the president and his election everyone was pretty sure it destroyed my career and it never dawned on me that i could lose my job and Health Insurance and kill my wife. Her medicine is 20,000 a month. I looked and the alternative the Affordable Care act, it wouldnt be affordable for that medicine. If i lost my job we would been in a world of hurt. My ratings went up instead and part of it was i spent less time talking about the daily news because i didnt want to talk about it, didnt support to my listener supported who called my station demanding i be fired and spent more time talking about other news and when i would talk about the president ial race, spend time critically of my own side, particularly people of faith who put their faith in a politician instead of a savior in heaven and my disappointment with that and the ratings kept going up. A diverse audience over time. Everybody thought i was destroying my career the show grew and i got a book out of it. I for a long time to ask people this question and one word of prep. You know the definition i am sure of profane. I personally think the price we have to pay for medicine, that was prompted by your 20,000 a month, is absolutely profane and knowing there is a just god in heaven somebody has got to answer for that i think. What do you think . I will be a lot of people answering for a lot of things on the last day. The importance is believing theres going to be that last day. Somebody asked a while back if i really believe that . Yes i do. Not only do i believe it, it gives me comfort we may see no justice in this lifetime but we will see what it really is in the next lifetime. My wife is a miracle of modern medicine that genetic medicine could be developed for a particular form of cancer very few people have. I understand the cost of her medicine because few people have it. And jacked up the price, things like that, you wonder what is going on. All i can say to my kids in the book is dont believe the myth that people are really good at humanity is really good, we are a bunch of sinners. I tell people im a conservative because im a christian and i know everybody is a sinner and i want as few of them in charge of me as possible. The government and people in charge, i dont want my kids to have that to be so jaded nothing can matter. I was on city council for a term. When i took my radio job i had to resign 6 months early because i couldnt have a parttime elected official job and fulltime radio job and it was the most miserable four years of my life, somebodys trash does not get collected you will get yelled at in the Grocery Store even if it wasnt your fault. The reason i ran for office was it dawned on me when i had to do, and 10 asian theme massage parlors were closed but every one of them was open and flies out the door and couldnt figure out what was going on. It a reference for human trafficking. I ran for office and was shocked, encouraged the police to do investigations and more than one of these places was shuttered for fronts for human trafficking. They find local landlords were politically connected and rent from them knowing they can provide them to stop the investigations, the only thing i read on and refuse to leave the radio show until we can pass ordinance and the thing we kept running into with people say why are you directing police from bad crimes to this . This is consenting adults . Pay no attention to the human trafficking, doesnt really happen, they cant get proof. A conservative came up the greatest way to show these places down, the regulatory state. We went to the legitimate massage parlors and they all had lightbulbs and clean Running Water and people werent allow to live in or over the shop so we passed a law that said if you have a massage parlor you have to have a log of your customers, lightbulbs in every room the work and not allowed to live there. And amazingly none of these places were open anymore because they didnt want to comply with basic regulations which you dont need to send police, just a business license inspectors, they love to shut people down and it worked. I dont want my child to experience the cynicism that is pervasive today that i experienced about politics but what would you suggest we do to move ourselves and posterity away from the cynicism that is pervasive in our political culture . It is not a political deck and it will sound like that. Stop looking to a group of people in washington dc to provide your solutions. Look to your local government and local community and local nonprofits and local churches and find solutions locally. It is a philosophical thing and some of you disagree but when we concentrate all our decisionmaking in one location, in addition to allowing us to become cynical when it doesnt go our way it makes every fight a hill to dine on because every fight is about that and the founders wisely said federalism is the solution, you should be able to live your life the way you live your life and people of like mind and move to another state if you find disagreement in that state instead of 1sizefitsall everywhere Big Government and what i found, whether you are conservative or liberal you think Washington Matters most and it was never designed to be that way. By focusing on the problems and allowing it to become as powerful as it has we give up on our local community. The number of counties in this country that now have in my position a Single Person running for open seats on School Boards or city council or county commissions is growing because people are not looking to their local county for their solution so why run for office . It is the one guy that covets power who runs as opposed to the local person who has a kid at a local Public School who is a problem and wants the problem fixed, the local school board will fix that for you. Reengaging local communities around the dinner table, on the sidewalk, in city council, is so important as part of civic commitment. And looking at far off places, i really want i write about this. They are masters of their own destiny. No one will solve problems for them. I learned that with my wifes Health Situation and my Health Situation. It is us having to do that and people not coming to us. We have to engage, the lack of engagement breeds cynicism and engagements where we dont matter. We dont matter to washington because they know how to micro targeted if they get so many votes from certain people they can get elected. The individual doesnt matter. At the local level the individual matters and what you do whether you are from nashville or any other city in your local community matters. He will affect more people on a daily basis by going to local soup kitchen and helping them feed others then you will by picking up the phone and yelling at a College Student in washington who works for your congressman and if we could get back to that taking care of each other locally instead of saying someone else will do it, i will stop, in seminary we spent three weeks in the sermon on the mount and what is jesus talking about . Talking about the concept of the Old Testament that god takes care of his people and people are supposed to take care of each other and the rich person who has a lot is supposed to take care of the poor person, you cant compel them to go there supposed to because they are the president of the porcelain suddenly rich and the rich for us and find himself or the roles reversed and people take care of each other in their local community. Cs lewis, convinced god did not intend us to care about disasters or the disaster in our backyard, his point was the rise of global news we care about something terrible that happened on the far side of the world the 100 years ago we were heard about a month from now. It gets us amped up. Usa today story the other day, the supervolcano in yellowstone may explode earlier than expected and wipe out all life on earth. If you read it we are still 400,000 years away from when that is supposed to be but you had to read to the bottom of the story to find it out. We and ourselves up on these things and care about things and worry about things. If nothing else this past year taught me my favorite verse of the bible is why worry about tomorrow, it will take care of itself. Focus on today. We need to do more of that, caring for people in our community and families and friends and not worrying about things that happened far off the we have no control and no power over and no one else does either. Not to say we are not supposed to know about him or maybe we can find answers or supposed to send people to help the poor in other countries but it is to say there is a great failure in the Christian Church in America Today where we send our kids to mexico to hammer nails and work on cans when we have Homeless People down the street we ignore because we dont consider that a mission deal. It is a damning indictment on the American Church that we have a lot of kids from inner cities with no fathers at home in crumbling Public Schools when you have great Church Facilities that are abandoned for 5 days, and give these kids a smaller education where the church is and open the facilities to these people but we lost our priorities, the American Church lost its priorities. So many Church Leaders decided to get political and cast their lot saying cyrus the great was returning us to jerusalem and letting us rebuild the temple, the temple has artie been built and rose again 3 days later and ascended into heaven, dont know why we are looking for that. It pains me to see so many people looking for Political Solutions for spiritual problems so thank you very much on that note. I hope you will buy a copy of the book and read it and pass it on to your family. If nothing else i have my family gumbo recipe in there. The most controversial part of my book because it doesnt have worcestershire in it which i point out to southerners is a british product which they dont care to have pointed out. Amazing how food can make people angry but around the dinner table, there are 33 recipes to accomplish that. Thank you for having me today, thank you. [applause] thank you for being here and thank you for joining us. And have it signed. We will meet you at the war memorial plasma