Carson puts faith in can-do spirit
Neurosurgeon aims to inspire, ‘heal this country’
DETROIT Before a packed audience in his hometown, Ben Carson officially kicked off his presidential campaign Monday morning. “I’m Ben Carson and I’m a candidate for president of the United States,” he said at Detroit’s Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts.
He may not have the traditional political experience of a presidential candidate, Carson said, but he noted that he also didn’t “have a lot of experience busting budgets.”
“The real pedigree that we need to help to heal this country,” he said, is a candidate “who believes in our Constitution.”
Carson began the day with a prayer breakfast with city pastors, then spoke to an assembly at the Detroit high school that bears his name before heading to the official launch of his presidential campaign.
Carson told a Florida TV station Sunday night that he was joining the race. From Detroit, he had been scheduled to travel to Iowa for three days of events in the pivotal state where the first presidential caucus of the 2016 election cycle will be held.
But instead he said he’d go to Dallas to be with his critically ill mother, Sonya Carson.
He sprinkled his remarks with religious references, noting, “If God ordains that we end up in the White House ... we are going to change the government into something that looks more like a well-run business.”
At the Charles Wright Museum of African American History before he announcing his bid, Carson told reporters he’s eager to hear what other GOP candidates have to say. “If they’re all saying the same thing I am, fantastic. The more the merrier, bring ’ em on,” he said.
His choice of Detroit for the official announcement is no surprise. He grew up in the city, the son of a house cleaner and a father who left the family when Carson was 8. His mother, Sonya, had only a third-grade education but didn’t let on to her sons.
In remarks to about 100 people at the museum, Carson talked about everything from the nation’s economy to his belief in creationism to the racial unrest that’s been erupting in the wake of deaths of black men in cities across the country.
“People have lost hope and therefore an opportunity arises to break into a place and to loot it and stuff your pocket with things,” he said of the unrest in Baltimore. Some people actually find it easier to collect benefits than to work a minimum-wage job. So can you really blame someone who decides to take that? But what it is doing is extinguishing the can-do attitude.”
In speeches around the country, as well as in his autobiography, Gifted Hands, the Republican who now lives in Florida often tells of his mother demanding that her two sons turn off the TV, read two books a week from the Detroit Public Library and write a report on those books that she would mark up — even though she couldn’t read the words.
“The main thing I’m hoping is that a lot of young people will rec- ognize themselves in me, recognize that they themselves are the most influential factor in achieving their goals,” Carson told the
Detroit Free Press when a movie based on his book was being shot in Detroit. “Know that it is not enough to just wish, that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication, but it can be done.”
Carson did it, turning what he calls his hated life of poverty, horrible temper and lack of enthusiasm for learning into earning high honors when he graduated from Southwestern High School in Detroit, a scholarship and a psychology degree at Yale University and a medical degree from the University of Michigan.
“I had a mother who believed in me and who would never allow herself to be a victim,” he said during a 2013 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. “We did live in dire poverty. I hated poverty.”
Despite his rough beginnings, Carson, at 33, became the youngest director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was the first to successfully separate a set of conjoined twins attached at the back of the head, and the first to successfully place an intrauterine shunt for a hydrocephalic twin.
For Alexis Pyles, 8, of Romulus, meeting the doctor Monday was overwhelming. “He’s my hero, my inspiration,” she said. “I like how before every surgery, he didn’t rely on his skills, he prayed.”
“Know that it is not enough to just wish, that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication, but it can be done.”
Ben Carson