RUSH: Here’s Ron in Sterling, Virginia. You’re next, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hello, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: Earlier you had said that you were an esteemed observer of culture?
RUSH: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: — and his prior book was The Greatest Generation.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: My question for you is: How did the greatest generation produce in their children the sixties generation?
RUSH: Oh, that’s a great question — and I, of course, have the answer. Here’s the answer. Take a look at the greatest generation; take a look what they did. Most of them endured the Great Depression, either when they were young or young adults, then along came World War II, Korea. These are people that lived in a country, at that time, much, much, much less affluent than it is today. They had to learn very early in life that there were things far larger than themselves, far more important. Hell, the country was attacked. We had a depression. You had to go to college to get an education to have a chance at a decent job. You know, those of us alive today, we can’t even relate to a depression. We’re in the most robust economy in the history of mankind. We’ve got the Drive-By Media trying to tell everybody we’re on the precipice of a recession, and everybody is panicking about it. We don’t know what hard times are! They did. They understood commitment, duty, honor, country. They united, all came together. Whatever differences they had were put aside. They were fighting World War II all over the world, and there weren’t any major dissenters in Congress of a major political party. We were totally unified.
After that, guess what happened? Nikita Khrushchev shows up at the UN, bangs his shoe and says, ‘We will bury your children.’ My parents and grandparents took him seriously. They had to. Look at what they had been through already. Then they had to gear up for what that portended, the Cold War. Then they had Korea thrown in there. They had a rigorous, very difficult, very hard life. They did not want their kids and their children to have to live that way. Every generation wants better, in terms of economics and opportunity and all kinds of things, for their kids than they had for themselves. That’s human nature, and it’s always been that way, and the sixties generation came along, the Baby Boomers — and I’m one of them — and life has been a piece of cake. We’ve had to invent our traumas. Attention deficit disorder. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We haven’t the slightest clue how tough life really was. We’ve had to make ourselves think it’s tough. Now, in our minds, it’s been hard. I’m not saying that the stress that people today go through is any different or less than the stress of previous generations. It doesn’t matter. The fact is, we all feel the stress. My point is, we’ve had to manufacture most of the reasons for it.
As such, we have had affluence and opportunity like our parents and grandparents couldn’t dream of — and, as such, we’ve had all this time on our hands to do what? Think about ourselves, and be concerned about ourselves. Some of us are 56, some of us are 55, and on certain days, we still feel like we’re 18. When my dad was 40, he was 40; and when he was 45, he was 45, and he felt 45. When he was 50, he felt 50. He’d been through hell. Every one of his friends felt the same way. We, at 56 and 55, we can go around and pretend like we’re in high school on the weekend if we want to. We don’t think of ourselves as our age. I’m 56. It’s the last thing on my mind that I’m 56. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel it physically, psychologically, emotionally. I feel young and spry, and this is because we didn’t have to learn to grow up real fast. We didn’t learn as soon as our parents did that there were things much larger in our lives than us — and part of the sixties generation still hasn’t, and that’s why they’re who they are. The left-wing sixties generation crowd — the godless bunch, the atheists, the people who think man is the beginning and end of all things, people that buy into this global warming hoax — are so inwardly focused, so self-focused, so unable to realize that there are things larger than themselves.
In fact, people who do realize there are things much larger in life than themselves — people who realize there are questions that we can all ask that we will never on this Earth be able to answer — those kind of people, who have that faith and those beliefs, provide a threat to certain elements of the sixties generation, because their faith is in themselves, and that kind of faith with no boundaries frightens people who have not yet learned that there are things much larger and more important than themselves. You say, ‘How did that generation, the greatest generation, produce the Baby Boom generation and some that have followed?’ It’s simply because they wanted their kids to have a better life than they did. They didn’t want them to go through a Great Depression. They didn’t want them to go through a world war. That’s why when Khrushchev banged the shoe, they took the Cold War seriously. Look at the money these people paid in taxes and everything else that it cost them to fight all these wars and go through the Great Depression. They didn’t want that for their kids.
Lo and behold, at the same time the Cold War is going, we have an economic boom coming in the fifties with Eisenhower, then JFK. We started an economic renaissance, a technological renaissance in this country that produced more and invented more in 50 years than the prior thousands of years of human civilization. There are a lot of reasons for that, the freedom that we have to be creative and inventive in this country. But it really… The root of it is that they just did not want their kids to have to go through what they did. So it was sort of a hands-off, laissez-faire type of parenting, in some cases — and in other cases, by the way, some of the anti-war leftist kids in the sixties were actually obedient to their parents, and when you say that, ‘What do you mean? They were radical. They were protesting authority.’ No, they were just being obedient in the sense that their parents were telling them, ‘Don’t be hemmed in, you know? Don’t accept convention. Go out and be fruitful and multiply,’ and all this sort of things, things that their parents wanted to do when they were young or growing up but didn’t have time for because there were too many serious things on the table.
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RUSH: David in Chicago, you’re next, sir. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Rush, listening to your comments about how our generation became the way it is, truly earns you the title of the great Maha Rushie. If I may have the temerity to add one thing.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: How effectively our generation was sold socialism and communism, and if we think a bit–
RUSH: Ah, ah! How…? Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah! How effectively SOME of our generation was sold socialism.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — and liberalism.
CALLER: Yes, that’s true.
RUSH: Not all of. Some of us had great parents who —
CALLER: Yes. Yes.
RUSH: — made sure that that stuff didn’t seep into our crevices, deep, dark crevices of our cranial cavity.
CALLER: Yes. Yes. And I am one such person whose parents would never have allowed me to behave that way, also growing up in the Archdiocese in Chicago, none of the nuns would, either.
RUSH: It’s a good point. The reason why in the sixties… Socialism, by the way, in worldwide history, it goes back as far as human civilization goes. It’s failed every time it’s tried, but that doesn’t matter to anybody, because the people that want power over the people who keep trying new ways to sell it. But I still maintain to you that one of the reasons why it was so attractive is that, because of the way sixties generation people were raised, in some cases, they had so much time on their hands and the parents are afraid to say ‘no.’ They didn’t want to distort their growth, or stunt anything about them, and so it gave rise to all kinds of things — and when you have got time on your hands, you can be concerned about, and we’ve had time on our hands. I know a lot of you think I’m nuts, because, ‘My gosh, Rush, what are you talking about? I’ve worked hard all my life!’ I know you have, but, at the same time, you’ve had a lot of time to think about yourself. We’ve had the choice to grow up doing what we want, if we’re fortunate enough to know what that is. A lot of our parents and grandparents had no choice. They had to take whatever they could get and try to make careers out of it. Then that got interrupted with the war, the Depression before that; grandparents and parents as well.
I’m just saying we’ve had a lot more freedom, and with a lot more freedom comes a lot more affluence, a lot more time. Plus, you cannot ignore that after World War II and so forth and the advent of — the creation, if you will, of — the so-called Soviet Union, they had a purpose, and they infiltrated the education system and they had people that were taking these young skulls full of mush and molding them and shaping them, and it still exists today. That’s actually one of the last areas remaining to be successfully challenged in terms of its monopoly, and we’ve successfully busted up the Drive-By Media monopoly, and some others, but education, particularly higher education… I mean, it’s pervasive even at the lower grades as well. We keep hearing horror stories about things being taught to kids all the way from first up to the tenth or eleventh grades.
A brief time-out here, folks. We’ve got a lot of audio sound bites I want to get to in the next hour. I’m a little bit behind in that. We’ll do that. More of your phone calls as well as the EIB… Folks, I want to apologize. Everything sounds so odd to me today that I’m so distracted by how it sounds, I think I feel like half of me is not even here. I’m so focused on what this sounds like. I hope my usual brilliance is nevertheless permeating your airwaves and your super-heterodyne receivers.
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RUSH: This is Phil in Portland. You’re next. I appreciate your patience, and hello.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush, from rainy Portland, Oregon. I’ve got a question, more of a comment. You know, you were talking about the greatest generation a minute ago, and my dad was a part of that generation. He passed away when he was about 78, World War II veteran, and I remember growing up as a kid. I’m probably about ten years older than you, and I can remember what he stressed with me is, ‘Man, whatever you do, don’t go into debt. You know, just buy what you can, pay what you can pay for, save your money,’ and all of these things that is a tough thing teaching our kids nowadays when everybody’s got all this credit available and they can spend their money and keep the economy going, but my dad was a whole different character. They grew up in a depression when they couldn’t spend money. They had to save as much as they could, and we used to go to doctors and we never had anything. We just paid the doctor when we went or you pay him so much a week, and it was a whole different mind-set, a different mentality.
RUSH: My dad told me the same thing. ‘Don’t go into debt, don’t do it.’ It kept drumming into my brother and me, and, of course, we after awhile got tired of hearing about it because it became almost the same thing as hearing, ‘Yeah, I had to walk ten miles in the snow with no shoes. That’s like how poor we were. And you boys, your mom won’t even take you on a bus. You don’t know how lucky you are.’ And I got so sick and tired of hearing it, over and over. I finally said… It wasn’t ’til I matured and grew up that I really understood how difficult life in the Great Depression was. But I had to study it because there’s no way I could relate to it because I didn’t live through it, and that’s what I finally told him. I said, ‘Look, this is not effective, Dad. I understand you’re trying to raise me to be the best you can be and I can be and so forth, but I didn’t go through the Depression. He said, ‘Son, I know you didn’t, but there might be one someday, and you gotta know how to handle it.’ He said, ‘Once something’s happened once, the odds are it’s going to happen again,’ and it was so horrible, they didn’t want their kids going through it. So, yeah, he was big on the ‘don’t go into debt,’ and all kinds of things. It’s different today, but the society is structured differently.
You know, speaking of debt, I am glad you mentioned this. I’ve got this story here. Get this. This is in the New York Times today: ‘Until the boom in subprime mortgages turned into a national nightmare this summer, the few people who tried to warn federal banking officials might as well have been talking to themselves. Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford. But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.’ So, they were warned. The Federal Reserve was warned about the market, the mortgage market mess seven years ago and didn’t want to do anything about it. Now, a caveat. This story appears in the New York Times, and the New York Times is the house organ of the Democrat Party, and the Democrat Party is targeting the lenders in this subprime mortgage debacle because they can’t wait for their constituents, the trial lawyers, to be able to take aim at ’em. Even though the lenders have already gotten soaked, it’s not enough.
They’re going to be fair game. If the Democrats get this legislation passed, they’re going to be fair game for the plaintiffs to be heading right for them in their back pockets after they’ve already been emptied — and, of course, we’re going to bail out some on both sides of this, quote, unquote, bailout. The lenders are going to be the bad guys here as far as the Democrats disproportionate New York Times is concerned, because it fits the narrative. ‘Lenders are big, agreed, rich capitalists on Wall Street and they have the poor and the middle class and the people barely hanging on! They have them at their beck and call, and they can cut them off and ruin their lives. They’re one paycheck away from being homeless,’ and, of course, class envy being what it is, the Democrats love to portray the lenders as being in that predatory category. So you have to read this in the New York Times with a jaundiced eye and seek some confirmation of it elsewhere. The dirty little secret in this is: Who created the lenders? I mean, these lenders just didn’t come out of the woodwork and say, ‘You know what? We want to loan money to people that can’t pay it back.’ Guess who made ’em do it? Congress!
‘Oh, yeah. The American dream. Red lining. Why, there are too many Americans out there being denied their fair and equal opportunity for a loan. There must be discrimination because capitalism is unfair.’ So, guess what? People that were bad risks, and very unlikely to be able to handle adjustable rate mortgage were lured in under the notion it was unfair they were being denied access to the housing market, and now here’s where we are. And the people who lured them in and created these subprime lenders, in part, are now acting like spectators! Members of Congress were innocent bystanders. ‘Why, look what happened here! Why, we need hearings; we need meetings, and we need lawsuits.’ It’s just like after Hurricane Katrina. These guys acted like they had nothing to do with the levees that didn’t get fixed, the aid that didn’t get there. Members of Congress, the guys who write the laws were acting as spectators, and they’re doing the same thing here. But keep in mind, Congress’ approval numbers have reached an all-time low in practically every poll that there is. Anybody who thinks that they have a lock on any result in any election coming up — well, other than these uncontested races. But if you think you know what’s going to happen in the Senate and the House, you think the Democrats are going to walk away with it, think they’re going to walk away with the White House, don’t be so hasty.