I was in juvenile detention center, and I was in Rikers Island. And there was an anthology written by the inmates called 'The Pen,' and I - you know, I had a crush on a girl, and she left me when I was incarcerated. And I found this poem in this anthology that talked about having your heart broken and being incarcerated.
People gossip. People are insecure, so they talk about other people so that they won't be talked about. They point out flaws in other people to make them feel good about themselves. I think at any age or any social class, that's present.
Years ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of that, but talking doesn't help much. Basically, it's going to have to be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.
Nearly every coach I've talked with tells me that the attention you get from media and other people is the thing you miss most. I don't know if that's right.
My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.
As a pastor, I addressed the sorts of issues I see people struggling with most and the issues talked about most directly and most frequently in the New Testament. That leads us to recurring concerns with sexual immorality, relational sins, and vices associated with the breaking of the Ten Commandments.
No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn't create that - society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that's good.
Most people I've talked to are convinced that they're not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I'm not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.
How did we win the election in the year 2000? We talked about a humble foreign policy: No nation-building; don't police the world. That's conservative, it's Republican, it's pro-American - it follows the founding fathers. And, besides, it follows the Constitution.
I remember while I was at school some of my Muslim friends talked about a handful of people spoiling things in every culture. Hatred or hurt or pain isn't specific to a religion. I think it's a matter of acceptance. The one thing the world has to accept is everybody is different. What is normal to us is different and unusual to somebody else.