Trust between the government and the people of this country is broken right now. I feel it every time I talk with young people. They look at a government that claims to work for everybody, but far too many do not believe it works for them at all.
I want trust reestablished between the government and the people of this Nation. I want it reestablished most for the generation coming up behind mine. I will only be around so many more years. The young people watching this clip could be around for another seventy. That is not their burden alone to carry. Life moves fast, and you do not want to wake up at seventy or eighty or ninety looking back and wishing you had done something differently.
That brings me to the hardest lesson I know. It is one I have lived by since my earliest days in uniform. Always choose the harder right path over the easier wrong one. There will always be an easier way out. The harder right path costs something up front, but it pays you back in a way the easy path never can. I have made hard decisions in my life that cost me plenty. I do not regret a single one of them, because I chose the harder right over the easier wrong every time it counted.
I brought up Maslow in this conversation because his hierarchy still holds true even if fewer people study it today. You build a foundation, work hard on the basics, and, if you do it right, you rise to a level of genuine self-satisfaction, a peace with who you are and what you have built. Too many people never get there, not because the path was closed to them, but because fear talked them out of walking it.
Young people asking whether the truth is worth the cost need to hear this plainly. The answer is yes, every time. The Republic was not built by people who took the easy path. It will not be defended by people who take it now.
Choose the harder right. Do not let fear make the decision for you.
