TODD: Coming up in this next hour we have a really powerful EIB High Note about a man who changes life through rehabilitating birds of prey. And in this current climate, it’s a remarkable story. You’re not gonna want to miss this.
RODNEY STOTTS: You see the bird, you instantly fall in love. You feel a connection. And it really saved me because I would have had too much time on my hands to do nothing. And having these birds and having to train them and having something else that you have to care about and do for keeps you grounded.
TODD: Another aspect of conservatism that I hope that our side of things will explore. And that is the redemptive nature of work beyond prison. And I mean this, that one of the things that we should show is the power of respect for human life and dignity and work and how it transforms lives as there Biden was handing out universal basic income, UBI, and just freeing, you know, dangerous felons under the cover of the covid. Conservatives can own and should own redemption of that nature.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
TODD: Thanks to Team EIB, everybody back there, so much for what you do. I wish you knew the love that goes into the show. Someday, I’m gonna find a way to really make that clear to you. Here’s an example. The EIB High Note. Right? We need things like this. Republicans/conservatives should own things like this. It’s redemption. It’s rebirth.
In this case, it involves a raptor that changed a young man’s life. There’s a young man, his name is Rodney Stotts, and he’s a former drug dealer-turned-falconer. So he was pretty hard-core criminal, went to 33 funerals in a year until he said, “No, I’m out. I don’t want to live this way,” and he took a job at Earth Conservation Corps in D.C. “Corps.” Who was it..? Was Obama that couldn’t say that? Yeah.
He met a falconer named Bob Nixon, and Mr. Nixon taught him about rehabilitating injured birds of prey. I didn’t know this, but most rappers don’t make it to adulthood. Rodney Stotts learned how intervention could help them survive and he noticed something that was a paramount to his life. And he made an immediate connection with these birds, and Stotts said, “The first time I held the bird, it took me somewhere else.” In that moment, he instantly knew there was way more to life than he had been living. In three decades since, Mr. Stotts has earned his falconry license, worked with thousands of youth in underserved communities, and has founded his own nonprofit called Rodney’s Raptors.
STOTTS: Before falconry, before I joined with the nonprofit — with the Earth Conservation Corps — I was a drug dealer. I’d sell coke, weed, pills. Whatever I had to sell, I would sell it. The whole street life, that’s what it was. You start understanding that there’s more to life than the street. There’s more to life than this corner. There’s more to life than sittin’ here with a gun, sittin’ here trying to flip this, having to duck these people. There’s more to life than that. We want to stop this nonsense of young people not having something to do. You know, we constantly hear people say, “Well, young people don’t have… They don’t want to do anything!” Yes, they do. If you give them an opportunity, yes they do.
TODD: And what would the left have us do? Give them a UBI. We should own this. Conservatives should own redemption. And it’s not about saying, “You didn’t commit the crime,” or, “We’re forgetting you committed the crime.” It’s not about that. It’s about saying, “Hey, let’s make it possible that you not do it anymore.”
Let’s use our principles of the dignity of life to help people live that way. Let’s use what God designed us to do. We’re designed to toil. We’re designed to help one another. We’re designed to forgive. Doesn’t mean forget. Doesn’t mean it was okay that you did the crime, right? Or we could just turn ’em all over to UBI and say, “Hey, here’s money for not working.”