00:00to you sir after that hello my name is Rosemary Oglesby Henry I am the CEO and
00:06founder of a local nonprofit Rosemary's Babies company that's the process to
00:11provide support for teen parents and families in Greater Cincinnati this week
00:16while over the last couple of weeks while we were dealing with so much
00:21violence in Greater Cincinnati one of my young parents children was run over by
00:26car three children under the age of five one of those children won't be able to
00:33walk then in my program I decided to talk to our young parents and I asked
00:40those young parents how many of them have a friend or know somebody that was a
00:45teen that was shot and killed every one of those parents said yes in fact my own
00:52son that I never exposed to any violence because I believed in the American dream
00:57and I tried to pull them up out of there this year has seen more than a dozen of
01:02his friends within that same victim system and so what it led me to ask
01:10especially when this young father he's 16 and he's so bright and he's so fun and
01:15when I asked any all my teens did they have a gun several of them did and when I
01:22asked them why they said that they did not feel protected and I have a problem
01:28with that because you come from a two-parent home and you live in a nice
01:33area and we have the police but what I'm trying to figure out is why do they feel
01:39that they need to protect themselves because they get a threat on Facebook and
01:43the automatic is where I used to fight I grew up in Avenue y'all now when somebody
01:49threatens them they're fearful that they're gonna take their lives and so my
01:55question for the kids that I talked to within my organization that I not only
02:00preach to protect your children and protect your person and protect your
02:05babies but I also teach about causes and consequences so if you don't pull that
02:10gun to protect yourself you might end up doing life and you lose the chance to see
02:15your baby grow up and they end up in the same cycle as you so we need to do more of
02:20that but my question is also this how do we retrain families the media government and
02:28even our leaders to start speaking positive life instead of fueling violence and
02:35fueling hate so these kids feel the need to protect themselves and go get a gun that's my problem
02:42thank you for sharing that heart-rending account of what one family's kids being run over by a car
02:53wouldn't you roll that log over now you see what crawls out what crawls out of that isn't pretty
02:59and so what's really going on in the country and I don't want to I don't want to move us too far
03:05past just what's in front of us here in Cincinnati but what we see in Cincinnati is a microcosm of a
03:10deeper problem that you put your finger on is that we are going through a kind of identity crisis
03:15right we've lost our way it's a spiritual crisis it's a crisis of meaning or you know what's our
03:22country you look at your iPhone do what it do what it tells you to do on a given day live your life
03:27going through the motions programmed by the algorithms that actually cause our brain to rot
03:33and stop us from being able to think independently commit acts of violence live in a culture of fear
03:37a mental health epidemic that's raging like wildfire with addiction fentanyl usage opioid addiction on the
03:44rise yeah there's there's a deep epidemic it's a cultural epidemic of fear of a mental health epidemic
03:50of a loss of spiritual purpose and meaning that we got to bring back and everything else we're talking
03:55about I believe with you is a symptom of that deeper void and and you know to our friends on
04:02the left I will say for a while they had a prescription for what fills that it's it's a
04:07kind of victimhood culture race gender sexuality climate maybe it's not not my fault it's not my
04:16responsibility it's what somebody else did to me and then what is somebody else going to do to fix it
04:20to your question there's a different answer to that question it isn't what you expect somebody
04:25else to do it's what we expect all of us to do not just some elected official in this deeper sense
04:30for our culture we've got to fill that spiritual void that moral void with the real thing individual
04:37family nation and God beats race gender sexuality and climate if we have the courage to stand for
04:44what's right for what's true to bring back the self-confidence in our young people to get the
04:49cell phones out of the classroom to be able to actually at a young age I mean some people might
04:55say this is unrelated what's he talking about make sure kids show up to school say the pledge of
05:00allegiance every morning with a moment of silence to be able to go along with it to ground ourselves
05:05in our actual sense of purpose and identity and who we are to restore the family unit as the ultimate
05:11full place of accountability the best form of governance better than any form of government
05:16known to the history of man that's what we ultimately are going to have to do to get to
05:20the root cause of all of this I think a revival of faith or at least belief in something higher
05:24in our country is a good thing that we shouldn't hide from fills that spiritual vacuum but in the
05:30meantime that's going to be a long it's a long project and we're not giving up on it just because
05:35it's a long project but it's like what I said to the woman's question earlier we can walk and chew gum
05:39at the same time we're going to work on that for the long run while scoring the easy wins that are
05:45sitting in front of our eyes for the short run either that can't be a substitute for saying that we're
05:50going to put more cops on the street for a substitute for saying we're actually going to empower them to
05:54be able to do their jobs a substitute for judicial system reform that allows violent criminals to
05:59actually remain in prison rather than being released so it's not either or it's not one of these or the
06:03other there's a deeper moral spiritual crisis of purpose and meaning we're going to have to fill
06:09that through true leadership not the fake stuff that just tells people what they're looking to hear
06:13we're not victims we're victors right that's who we are at our core but that's part of what we're
06:18going to have to have as a cultural reawakening in our country starting with our state we're going to
06:23work on that in parallel with fixing the common sense reforms that are actually going to at least
06:28prevent those preventable crimes from happening right here in Cincinnati so thank you I appreciate that
06:32question all right
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