Time To Walk The Walk GOP: Less Poverty Of Ideas, Take More Action Against Poverty

Many more young conservatives should join groups like Teach For America, AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps: While they will be nauseated by the liberal propaganda fed to them during the training sessions and all subsequent meetings, they will be deeply satisfied by the actual work. The work is hands on, from the heart and an opportunity to live the conservative belief that it is OUR responsibility to work hard to make the world better.

These jobs will not make you rich and they bring very little glory. These jobs will get you cussed at and threatened by the Crips in your classroom or sent to a clean up site with a shovel in New Orleans or make you homesick in some other part of the world. But they will open your eyes to poverty, hopelessness and despair.

And if nothing else, it will show you in basic terms why you’re a conservative.

The point of my earlier thoughts about community organizers wasn’t to say that these groups are the solution to inner city problems. Nor did I intend to take a “cheap shot” at Sarah Palin. It was and is a challenge to the stale urban policies and outlooks of the conservative movement. Getting young conservatives into urban schools won’t save the schools, but at least it will open up more of our minds as to the realities on the ground.

It's true that Obama struggled very much in his role as a community organizer; he saw up front society’s failures that cause so much despair in our own nation. His successes were limited by institutionalized failures.

Those institutional failures are liberal failures and they persist all over our country today. But politically, we continue to let the Democrats own these areas.

Fact is, Obama was at least there trying. Conservatives are standing on the sidelines when it comes to the inner cities. What moral clout do we have to even talk about workable solutions like vouchers and charter schools?

I work with a terrific Republican man here who quit his job as a trial lawyer to teach in this impoverished city school. He gives his students a choice of Pop Tarts if they make it to his class on time in the morning. It’s the grandfather in him, he says, that makes him feed hungry kids. It’s against his conservative nature to “give” stuff out, but he knows how hungry the kids are and that it’s important to show them that he cares.

Like all conservatives, he wants lower taxes and a strong national defense. But he’s fed up with failed cities that give up on kids so he decided himself to come here and fix the problem – at least in his own classes.

We'll need more than the two of us to fix the bigger political problem. Do we as conservatives have any plans to reach out to the millions of voters of color in the country – the vast majority of whom don’t identify with the Republican message?

Lots of young conservatives are interested in the social issues fed to them by liberal professors in college. They, like me, probably don’t agree with their professor, and they believe there must be a better way. That’s why I joined Teach For America – to live my spiritual as well as my political beliefs. Come join.