RUSH: I love this story. ”Family Ties Key to Youth Happiness’ — So you’re between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? A worried, weary parent might imagine the answer to sound something like this: Sex, drugs, a little rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe some cash, or at least the car keys. Turns out the real answer is quite different. Spending time with family was the top answer to that open-ended question, according to an extensive survey — more than 100 questions asked of 1,280 people ages 13-24 — conducted by The Associated Press and MTV on the nature of happiness among America’s young people. … Nearly three-quarters of young people say their relationship with their parents makes them happy. ‘They’re my foundation,’ says Kristiana St. John, 17, a high-school student from Queens in New York. ‘My mom tells me that even if I do something stupid, she’s still going to love me no matter what. Just knowing that makes me feel very happy and blessed.’ Other results are more disconcerting.’ And, of course, what AP story would not be complete without this next finding. ‘While most young people are happy overall with the way their lives are going, there are racial differences: the poll shows whites to be happier, across economic categories, than blacks and Hispanics.’ (Laughing.) Even in a what-makes-you-happy poll, woman, minorities, poor, et al, are the hardest hit. ‘You might think money would be clearly tied to a general sense of happiness. But almost no one said ‘money’ when asked what makes them happy.’
Now, let me sum this up. All of the things that conservatives have been fighting liberals over for the last 50 years: strong family ties, controlled sex, religion, faith, parents, according to this poll, were right, and they, the liberals, are wrong. The old-fashioned things that we fought to save and they’ve fought to destroy in the end are what make kids happy, secure, and healthy individuals. You know what I didn’t find? I read the whole story. I didn’t find one kid that said government makes them happy. I didn’t find one kid that said, ‘Yeah, my senator makes me happy.’ I didn’t find one kid, one answer here that said, ‘My congressman makes me happy.’ I didn’t see anything in here about a village making kids happy. Parents, yes. God, yes. Friends, yeah. Sex did not show up that much in terms of providing happiness. Now, this is going to be buried, but if it were not buried this would turn liberal education theory and feminism, sociology, the Democratic Party platform, and MTV on their ears. They’ll adjust this to these conservative fuddy-duddies, and they’ll start promoting religion, parents staying together for their kids — yeah, right. I don’t think we’ll get that kind of promotion from them. At any rate, I found the whole thing just invigorating.
We got a sound bite from Hillary Clinton coming up here in which she says she’s been fighting those people, meaning us, for 35 years. When I saw that, it got me to thinking, who has she been fighting and for what? I got to thinking, do we fight them? I think, yeah, we do, but there’s a fine-line distinction. For example, this program. This program is aimed at you, the people. We conservatives engage in an intellectual pursuit. We want you to be intellectually understanding of conservatism, be able to apply it, be able to learn it so well you can explain it and be persuasive. In the process, when we are attacked by people like Mrs. Clinton who admits doing it for 35 years, we will then jump to the defense of ourselves and others and point out things about them. But the fine-line difference is that they are doing the exact opposite. They are not trying to expand the minds or the opportunities of the people they want to vote for them. They are trying to destroy their enemies. I say it’s a fine line. I wouldn’t mind politically destroying the left, but we do it in much different ways.
So you have a story here about childhood happiness, or youthful happiness, and you find out that basic traditional values are what bring it about, especially in this day and age. In fact, this poll actually doesn’t surprise me, folks. Given all of the pitfalls and the decay, the perversion, and the destructive nature of pop culture and the way it’s reported, these were pretty heartening results, especially when the sponsoring agencies here are AP and MTV. It’s one of the reasons why I’m always optimistic. I always think the future is bright. In the midst of all this turmoil and angst and chaos and the perception that the younger generation is going to hell in a handbasket, which every adult generation always thinks, by the way, there are real signs of optimism out there. For young people to say what they said here, it means they have a pretty solid foundation, a pretty solid understanding of what gives life its real meaning, and real meaning in your life, that’s something that a lot of people never grow up to find or they find it pretty late. So I was encouraged by it.
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RUSH: Let’s see, Bennington, Vermont, next. Brian, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, a pleasure.
RUSH: Yes, sir!
CALLER: I was intrigued by your survey that you reported on the youth in the country and what they considered important in their lives.
RUSH: Yeah, what makes ’em happy. It’s a happiness survey.
CALLER: Exactly. I think it was Edmund Burke once said that tradition is the sum total of our knowledge as a people, which goes to the fact that family tradition is so important to us as a culture. What I would like to see is I would like to see this survey expanded. I would like to go to the black community, and ask the youth in the black community, ‘What is the most important thing in your life?’
RUSH: Well, they did.
CALLER: ‘What is it you would want more than anything else in the world that you don’t have?’ and I think what they would answer would be a two-parent family.
RUSH: Well, it could be, but we don’t know that. It would be dangerous here to speculate. It makes sense that they would say that, given the status of single-parent families in the black community.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: But this survey dealt with that. Of course with the AP involved, with the Drive-By Media involved — and, of course, MTV — it had the obligatory, ‘I don’t care how much happiness there is out there, minorities ain’t happy. They just ain’t as happy. The blacks and the Hispanics are just not quite as happy.’ Now, the way libs deal with this, folks, is to not figure out why the blacks and the minorities are not happy. We gotta figure out why the white kids are too happy and do something about it! It’s not fair. It just isn’t fair! Here again we’ve got discrimination and what have you. Happiness is now something that decides its relevance and its place based on race. So the traditional liberal value… They do love to have people equal. Equality to them is misery spread around as equally as they can make it.