Brains

Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who challenged Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, won Senate confirmation today to join Trump’s Cabinet as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson and his older brother were raised in 1950’s Detroit by a single mother who had married at age 13, had a third grade education and could not read, and who suffered from severe depression and had attempted suicide.  Despite all of the reasons he should have failed, Ben Carson turned to the Christian faith, and endured repeated failures and near-failures, to complete college at Yale University, medical school at the University of Michigan, and to eventually become a world renowned pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.  He became a best-selling author and public speaker.  In 1994, Carson and his wife started the Carson Scholars Fund, which awards scholarships to students in grades 4–11 for “academic excellence and humanitarian qualities.”

Critics on the left have openly questioned whether Carson has the necessary qualifications for the job managing one of the federal government’s most complex departments.

Perhaps their doubts are sincere – after all, he is just a compassionate and generous black man inspired by a deep personal faith, raised in a broken family, who climbed out of inner city poverty, and against all of the odds achieved greatness and respect over a lifetime of service to humanity in the most challenging medical specialty within the noblest of professions.

What could he possibly have to offer to the struggling inner city families of America?