Interview with Ron Bourque | Sound Authors Radio

November 26, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, July 4, 2008. It’s Independence Day and my next guest on the show, Ron Bourque, his book is called Disturbing Questions: Has God Stopped Blessing America. Welcome to the show.

Ron Bourque: Thank you doctor and happy Fourth of July to you and all your listeners.

Dr. Kent: To you too. So tell me a little about this book.

Ron Bourque: Well, I work as a management consultant and I try to help organizations become more competitive. So we don’t have to send all the jobs to India, China and all that kind of stuff. Of course we’re losing the battle but at any rate I’ve been doing this economic analysis of our country since the early 90s. 92 in fact and I began to notice that we’re on this incredible losing streak and its gotten worse and worse year after year and I don’t know why it took me so long to notice the correlation but it looks like all this trouble started back in the early 70s. Can you think of anything that’s happened in the early 70s that kind of comes to mind? Like maybe 1973?

Dr. Kent: Like disco balls?

Ron Bourque: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: And?

Ron Bourque: The oil shortage started back then.

Dr. Kent: Right.

Ron Bourque: A whole bunch of other things but one of the things I think happened that kind of got my attention and I kind of thought it was ridiculous at first but the whole idea of Roe vs. Wade. It was like, oh my goodness, could this be a coincidence? And it’s a kind of crazy question and I kind of put it aside and didn’t want to do anything with it. but it seemed like every time I turned around I’d find another bit of data or something like that, that pointed in the same direction and then I started doing some research and it was incredible how many things just seemed to start going wrong right about that same time frame.

If you think in terms of the book that we call the Holy Bible, it’s kind of like an interesting love story that’s sort of very repetitive. Things go along very well and all of a sudden we start experimenting with I don’t know false gods or something like that and its something that He doesn’t like and he steps back and says, “Okay go ahead and try your way for awhile.” And we do, and we go off and get into all kinds of trouble. The harder we try to get out of the trouble, the worse things seem to get.

Dr. Kent: Are you equating the modern day United States with Israel in the bible?

Ron Bourque: Well I wonder if that sequence isn’t continuing even to this day and again it’s a question. I don’t know the answer, that’s why the book is called Disturbing Questions. I put the question out there, I’m not a prophet or anything, I don’t have a direct line to God or any of that other kind of stuff, but I look at that and I look at all of the correlation and that word correlation means an awful lot because I do a lot of problem solving. And when you see things that correlate with each other it could very will be that this gives you the cause of the problem.

Dr. Kent: You say Roe vs. Wade is the root of the problem. Explain to me do you mean that when the courts decided that a woman has a right to choose whether to have an abortion or not that’s the moment God started not blessing America?

Ron Bourque: Well I’m asking the question. I’m asking the question from the perspective of when we decided that it was okay to have abortions legally was that kind of like God stepping back and saying okay go ahead and try it your way for awhile.

Dr. Kent: Do you feel like it’s the same thing with like war or capital punishment or something like that or is abortion a unique thing for you? I know you talk in your book about the number of abortions that have been performed and the number of people that would have been and things like that. Do you equate that to other kinds of killing like war or what do you think about those things?

Ron Bourque: I kind of think that all killing isn’t a good thing but I think that abortion is a special category because now what we’re doing is killing a perfectly defenseless child in a womb that hasn’t had a chance to do anything to earn such a punishment.

Dr. Kent: What about the premise of Roe v. Wade and all of the abortion legislation. You’ve got two lives to protect, one is the mother and one is the child. What do you think about for example the cases of rape or incest or underage children that won’t be able to raise their kids or things like that?

Ron Bourque: Well I think that those don’t make any difference. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t wish some of these circumstances on anyone, but if through whatever reason somebody becomes pregnant the idea of adding essentially murder to the scene doesn’t fix anything it only makes it worse.

Dr. Kent: Is a condom also murder?

Ron Bourque: Well I don’t think of that as murder per se because what you’re doing is preventing the conception from happening in the first place. When a male sperm fertilizes the woman’s egg, you now have a third person.

Dr. Kent: Right. So lets say that it is a case that certain people believe that, lets say a large amount of the American population believes that abortion is murder, a lot of people don’t, but lets go by the premise and say abortion is killing of a fetus and lets say that its wrong. Form that point, I still don’t understand is that because we are committing this act your concept is that God might have stopped blessing us?

Ron Bourque: Yes and essentially if you look at our history, we’ve been incredibly blessed and everything seemed to go right with us, even through a couple of world wars and stuff where we came out victorious and not in a small way but in a big way and we were victorious economically. Our standard of living has multiplied. Each generation has done much better than the previous generation and this has gone on for quite awhile. And we’ve got this long string of successes and then all of a sudden since 1973 all the things that seemed to be going right for us started going wrong. And it’s getting worse and worse all the time.

Dr. Kent: What about from 1980 to 1988 Regan era where most conservatives believe that the country was booming pretty well. The trickle down economics started; what’s your take on that?

Ron Bourque: I think that President Regan and I’m a fan of his, did an incredible job. He had a lot of insight and he dramatically improved our economy but I always have the question in the back of my mind if how much better could it have been if we didn’t have that abortion problem. See Regan did a pretty good job with the hand he was given. But if he had had a better hand to play I wonder if things could be even better.

When we look at what’s going on today with all the jobs going overseas, with gas now $4.00 a gallon and who knows where its going to end, now they’re saying $7.00 a gallon. Our national debt is way out of control. The average person is working very hard to scrape a few things together and a lot of them don’t have any hope. What happened to the American dream?

Dr. Kent: Could that have come from things like failed economic policies? Clearly the Bush administration has messed up a lot of things in economical side. The great depression happened in the 30s, it was another economic mess-up. Is it possible that these things theoretically the God not blessing America could be because of maybe God is starting to bless other people around the world as much as us or maybe we made some false decisions and maybe it doesn’t go back to abortion?

Ron Bourque: It certainly could be. As I said earlier, that’s one of the reasons its called Disturbing Questions; however, we’ve made some incredibly big mistakes and when we talk about the president Bush and the economy, the legacy that we’re struggling with right now today is not President Bush’s legacy, its President Clintons legacy. President Clinton is the one who signed NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement. He signed GATT, The General Agreement on Tariffs and Taxes and he also gave the Chinese most favorite nation trading I forget the last word but at any rate he set this thing up.

Now people say gee whiz, if it’s so bad and all the jobs are going over there, why didn’t President Bush put a stop to it? That’s a very good question but what they don’t understand is it’s like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It came out a heck of a lot easier. Try putting it back in sometime, that doesn’t work very well. Once we let those jobs go over there, it changed our economy fundamentally. If you remember early in the Bush administration, he’d only been president for a few months; one of our spy planes collided with a Chinese fighter jet off the coast of china and was forced to land on the Chinese island.

The Chinese immediately took the crew prisoner, took over the plane, started going through it to get whatever intelligence they could out of it and everything and the Americans were incensed and everybody was screaming up and down we’ve got to stop trading with china. The heck with them. Sounded good but what most people don’t know is a fair number of presidents of large companies went to the White House and said President Bush if you shut off trade with China you’re going to put us out of business because the components of the things we make and sell come from there and we don’t have another place to get them from.

We have made a strategic and fundamental error. The Chinese can shut us off any time they want and there’s very little we can do to them. In fact, even if we forget about manufacturing for a few moments and believe me that’s not a good thing to forget about, when we look in terms of our incredible debt, more than 50% of which is funded by China, people now talk about something they call the nuclear option for China.

The interesting thing is it doesn’t require them to fire a single nuclear weapon, no missiles, none of that kind of stuff. All they have to do is start dumping bonds. It will immediately destroy our financial systems and bring us to our knees. People claim that would be more devastating than a nuclear attack. We have never in our entire history been this subservient to another country.

Dr. Kent: Right, so I would agree with all of what you just said. It’s a fascinating thing to talk about the outsourcing and to talk about China and things like that. We don’t have any more time but we will check out your book, it’s Ron Bourque and the book is called Disturbing Questions: Has God Stopped Blessing America?

I guess neither one of us probably think that God has stopped blessing America. My opinion is God blesses the whole world and I think we both share that but check out this book for some questions, whether abortion, whether outsourcing; it’s a fascinating discussion to have. Thank you for being on the show Ron.

Ron Bourque: Thank you very much doctor and please have a great day.

Dr. Kent: Have a great Fourth of July.

Ron Bourque: You too.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be someone named Arupa Tesolin. She’s going to talk with us about the creative process in her book The Spark. Come on back for that.

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