Not Your Typical Saturday

by Arthur R. Thompson, CEO, The John Birch Society

He couldn’t believe it. Saturday afternoon and 31 adults and 5 teenagers had gathered to learn about The John Birch Society.

It was an experiment, running a course on the Constitution, history, heritage, and current politics to 15 home-school students in 24 sessions. Ultimately the course had a large impact on 15 teenagers and 51 adults, including the parents of the students and others in the room who had learned of the course and the JBS through word of mouth of the parents.

The experiment was conducted by Alan Scholl, the Executive Director of the American Opinion Foundation. It was more successful than he imagined it could be. Not only were 15 students now well-educated in the Constitution, but over 30 parents had sat in on the classes as well. It was these parents who brought people together for the Saturday session.

It was to be a ninety minute presentation. It lasted six hours — they were so hungry for the truth they did not want to leave. And once Mr. Scholl had their confidence through the home-schooling course, they were ready for the ultimate solution: involvement in the JBS.

I had already made the decision to segue into a more modern outreach to students due to new available software using a combination of Birch networking, online television, with physical as well as online seminars all through the Web. The word to note here is “outreach.”

For some, it will be difficult to believe, at first, that our summer camps would only get in the way of educating tens of thousands of students and their parents, if we continued to put so much time, energy, and money into the camps instead of the newer methods available to us in outreach and education.

And that is what the new system we are building will accomplish: educating students far beyond our membership’s young people.

For too many years we have been educating mostly the children of our members in the camps. This in itself is not enough.

It is not the job of The John Birch Society to educate members’ children. It is the job of the parents themselves. It is the job of the parents themselves. And building more responsibility is the task of the Society, not taking it away from the parents who understand.

In addition, we teach students that welfare and socialism is wrong, yet many sat in camp by means of a subsidized system. We have even raised money for some to attend free of charge.

We are not saying that we should not provide the means for parents to educate their children, but it should be done in a manner that promotes parental responsibility and an investment by the student as well — if we mean to raise responsible citizens.

Initially, Robert Welch started a youth program and the camps were added as an adjunct. Due to the circumstances at the time, the youth program was stopped but the camps stayed. Mr. Welch saw this as a possible means one day to segue into a bricks and mortar school. It did not happen.

Teaching students the problem without a healthy outlet for them to get involved in a solution does not make sense. And we have proven time and time again that generally students will not be active in adult chapters. They feel out of place. They want to interact with their peers. Our Freedom Generation project will be developing programs to do just that.

In addition, over the years we have received many requests for us to institute family camps. We have not been able to do this due to the camp facilities available as well as other factors such as the cost to rent camps. The cost has become prohibitive in many areas of the country for use just as student facilities let alone families. It is not unusual for the rent paid to the camp owners per person in camp to be from $450 to $1200, including all students, counselors, staff, etc. For a family, this would be too much.

With the new system we are constructing, the costs will be much less expensive than parents have experienced in the past — even free at first. We will have to raise funds to put our program together to utilize our Web capabilities, initial equipment, and inventory of lesson curricula. We will offer the television lessons for free initially, but ultimately the process will turn into an income stream. The funds to set this up will be truly an investment in the future.

I have long believed that private as well as government education was very deficient in some areas of learning. If you look at the results of private and even religious schools in the area of understanding as we mean it, they are woefully deficient. The ability of the neo-cons to fool the religious right over and over again is example enough of the lack of understanding embedded in what we would normally call a good education.

The three basic areas that I feel need to be inculcated into any student curricula for them to reach a level of understanding sufficient for them to be able to preserve their heritage are:

1. Classic liberal arts education underpinning the Constitution.
2. Civic moral responsibility. Which includes the responsibility to pass on the heritage left to us by our country’s Founders to our children.
3. The fact that we battle people, not ideas. Ideas are the tools of people, either for good or for evil. Nothing happens in politics that someone did not think about and organize. If it is evil, the exposure of the person or persons involved usually goes a long way toward solving the problem or solves it completely by stopping the evil intent.

It is quite simple really. If a bank robbery team is discovered before the fact, does not this exposure solve the problem? The same applies to those with evil intent relative to ruling over the people in some form of power grab. The problem lays in the lack of understanding that it is a power grab, the ramifications of the sometimes subtle changes in law or procedure of government, and/or the simple change of moving responsibility of some sector of public life from the people to the government.

An example of the latter would be the Social Security System. Can anyone argue that this system has produced people who now realize that by allowing government to take care of their retirement that they may not have a retirement due to other policies of the government? Or, that the system was bound to run out of money at some time due to the very structure of the system? Or, that in order to meet the so-called demands of government, they would use the taxes for the retirement of our people the second they hit the government coffers, leaving no “trust fund” in existence, only a paper entry? Not to mention that if government has control of your retirement, at some point you will do what the government wants you to do.

Our citizens under 40 recognize much, if not all, of the above.

Our Society has a dual task, one of educating and the other of activating. After all, what good is the knowledge if you do not put it to use?

The same is true of youth.

People do not want to know about problems that they cannot do anything about. It is one of the prime mistakes that we make as members as we go about the business of “Birching.” We automatically think that all we have to do is tell people about the problems and they will start to seek out ways of dealing with them.

Let me ask you: Do you want to hear about another problem? Will it help you in any way to lighten your load? Make you feel better about the day? Feed your family?

Obviously not.

Yet we bog down in learning so much about the problem sometimes that we forget to talk about or even engage in the solution. And, for us who understand, the answer is in The John Birch Society.

Businessmen and the youth are very attuned to the idea of not wanting to be bothered if there is no solution or the solution is not identified simultaneously to the problem.

One of the standards of leadership and management is that you do not bring a problem to your superior without offering a solution for it. Otherwise, you can be looked upon as a troublemaker. Especially if it is a problem in someone else’s department. You may think that you are doing a service to the company and so forth, but it is how the problem identification is handled coupled with showing your true worth by offering solutions.

Of course, it works much better if you show the problem to the person responsible rather than going around them to a higher manager to show them how much you know. In kind, if that person sees a problem in your department they will reciprocate to let you see the glitch before your boss does! This helps build teams rather than create splits.

Back to the point, with every problem we have to offer a solution. With us, it is by showing the ultimate solution through membership and the action programs of the JBS. The two, problem and solution, must become hand and glove in building understanding among our contacts.

Even more so with businessmen and students. Herein, however, I am addressing the student side of the situation.

We are moving to reestablish a youth movement within our organization as we once started to do in the 1960s. It will take time, and we have no absolute idea of how this will flesh out as I write this column. Accordingly, we have moved the Freedom Generation aspect of the American Opinion Foundation from under AOF into the JBS. The primary purpose is that a tax-deductible entity cannot engage in a number of specific actions that we need to do in order to solve the problems we face in our country.

Students must be given a responsible and effective outlet for their desire to do something about “it.” As part of The John Birch Society, our youth outreach can channel useful, effective action into the overall movement. 

There will be a number of challenges to deal with. The main one will be sustainability. Youth grow up and move into more adult activities and surroundings. This means that we will always have a problem finding new leadership within any youth program that we develop.

No one is saying that the job will be easy, far from it. But once we start the process, we envision a larger return from our efforts in the hands of the youth. As Robert Welch said in the JBS Bulletin for February 1973: "For Truth in the hands and minds of Youth becomes a doubly powerful weapon."

With proper organization this is fact. This was Robert Welch’s vision. We have set in motion the means to return to it.

We are not interested in programs that continue the status quo. We must develop and utilize programs that have a true outreach and measurable results. This has to be as true for any youth program as for anything else that we do.

Some things we have been doing for a long time may seem to be adequate. However, as time marches on, we have to look at how we can utilize new means and technology to further our overall mission.

There will always be the natural aversion to change and longing for the comfortable past. One of the saws I have a difficult time with is, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” The saw should be, “If you can do it better, you’d better.”