RUSH: We have Faith from ‘parts unknown’ in Michigan. Nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, ma’am.
CALLER: Rush, I’m a new listener, and, dare I say, I’m a devout listener.
RUSH: How long have you been listening to the program, Faith?
CALLER: Probably about a year, I would say.
RUSH: Well, welcome here. How did you discover this program?
CALLER: Eating lunch at White Castle.
RUSH: Yeah, we own White Castle. Well, good, good. I’m glad that you hung in there once you heard the program. You probably have heard a lot of very critical things of this program before finding yourself in that White Castle that day.
CALLER: You know what, Rush, I was a Democrat in the past and now I’m a staunch Republican, and I listen to you just devotedly, and I’ll tell you, I agree with just about everything you say, except one thing.
RUSH: What’s that?
CALLER: You know, the part about the union. You had a very eloquent lady call one day, talking about her husband, a lower level manager and engineer. Well, my husband is a production worker for General Motors, and I’ll tell you, my husband is very committed, and he’s a hard worker, which a lot of the production workers are. And both of us have worked for — he hasn’t, I have, where you have unions, and you don’t have unions. And I’ll tell you, at the lower level, the trenches, like where we are, we need people to protect us, and like my husband will tell you how disrespectful some of those like lower level managers can be. And, I don’t know, you probably have something to say about that.
RUSH: Well, look, I appreciate your being a devoted listener. I’m glad you called because I need to avail myself of every opportunity I can to make the following point.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: That is, I am not opposed to union people. I support the workers. I don’t support unions, and I don’t support the union leaders, but I support anybody who’s working, and I am all for anybody, everybody earning as much as they can. I want independence and liberty and prosperity for everybody, and this is the place in the world to come do it, at least it is now, and has been for the longest time. We all have bosses who are not fun to work for, to one degree or another. This is common. I myself have had some that were doofuses, and you have to put up with it. And sometimes you don’t put up with it and you get fired. There’s all kinds of personality types. You’ve got arrogant abrasive, you’ve got management that doesn’t care, that doesn’t notice what you’re doing, then you’ve got insecure management. Everybody thinks management is totally secure, that nothing ever rattles ’em, that they never, ever get in trouble, and it’s not true. They got people looking at them, too. There are all personality types all over the place. I don’t know what you heard me say about unions. I think the call that you heard, I remember, that woman called, and her husband was nonunion.
CALLER: Her husband was nonunion, and she was talking about how he had to go in Easter Sunday one time.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: You know, Rush, there’s plenty of times my husband, being a production worker, the attitude amongst the engineers, like if the line breaks down, and my husband is very mechanical, and quite a number of those guys that work the lines, Rush, they know exactly what’s happening with the machinery, and my husband comes home so frustrated because the attitude among a lot of the engineers is, ‘Well, if you guys were intelligent, you’d be engineers, so shut up and back off.’
RUSH: Look. I don’t want to be insensitive here, I really don’t, but we’ve all faced that in our careers. Do you know how many literal insane idiots I had to work for in my career?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Do you know how many people who have tried to tell me how to do what I do, who have never done what I do? I’ve had to go into coaching sessions. In fact, I got fired in a place once that had no cause. They just wanted to get rid of me. I got stabbed in the back by some coworker, anther guy at this radio station and I was naive and didn’t understand how the game was being played.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: I was also doing some controversial things on the radio, but I was not doing anything that I could be fired for with cause. I was not a member of a union, they didn’t need cause, but they didn’t want to pay a whole lot of money to get rid of me, so they tried to make me quit, and one of the things I had to do every afternoon was to go in for a one-hour review of my three-hour on-air presentation, and I had to listen as the program director, who had never done what I’ve done, told me I was using the word ‘therefore’ too many times ’cause it confused the audience, it cluttered the mind. And the next time I used the word ‘therefore,’ I was going to be in big trouble. It’s like telling somebody don’t think ‘pink.’
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: You’re thinking pink. I went through there and I knew what was going on, so I smiled and I said, ‘You’re right. I agree with you. The word ‘therefore’ does clutter the mind. I’m going to do better. I’m going to try not to use it,’ and it got ridiculous. This went on for two weeks, but I knew what they were doing, and I was not going to quit, and I was not going to let ’em force me out of there, and they ended up firing me and paying a severance package and so forth. But we’ve all gone through this. Union is not the answer to it. You’re going to have people above you wherever you work, some of them are going to just be mean, incompetent, insecure people. Others are going to be great. And, you know, we have choices in this country. You can either accept a situation, try to make the most of it and say, ‘Okay, I have to stay here, my family’s here, I can’t pack up and move, who knows where I can find a job,’ or you can say, ‘I’m not going to put up with this. I’m not going to be disrespected like this,’ and if I’m better than the people I work for, I’m going to go get a job where I can use all my talents. It’s an attitudinal thing.
If you’re going to sit around and accept the attitude that you’re always going to be an employee and you’re always going to have a boss and you’re always going to have to eat the excrement sandwich, or do you someday want to be a boss, do you someday want to be independent and free of that? We live in a country where people can make that choice each and every day. That’s why I’ve always said that most of the limitations that people have are self-imposed. Most of the limitations we have are not because somebody won’t let us do something. It’s ’cause we don’t want to do what it takes to do something else, or we can’t move, or whatever, but most of the limitations that people place on themselves are self-imposed, or have are self-imposed, and so union is not the solution to any of this. Union is not the correction. But please don’t misunderstand. I have absolute, total support for each and every employee in this country, whether unionized or not. Because, see, I want a successful country, defined in a lot of ways.
I want a moral country and I want a prosperous country and I want a country with all kinds of future for everybody who has yet to be conceived and born. This requires the people who are alive today also want the same things and have the ability, by virtue of how they live their lives and govern themselves, to create the same set of circumstances we were all fortune enough to be born into. This is why cultural moral decay is a great, great, great concern. It’s not because there are some of us who disapprove personally, it’s because of the overall effect, over time, long after I’m dead, what’s going to happen to this country, with this moral rot, with this silly notion that kids are so fragile that you can’t tell them the truth about the economy, or that you have to drag them in and show them a propaganda movie by Algore and then bring their parents in and threaten the parents, ‘If you don’t come watch it, your kids’ grade will suffer.’
Now we’ve got some of the silliest economic notions that the people of this country voted for, and we sit around and we hope and pray that they overreach. And I’m convinced they will. I’m convinced the Obama people are going to vastly overreach and if he puts this $850 billion stimulus package or billion dollar, trillion dollar, whatever it is, year and a half from now, folks, you’re going to see approval numbers for Barack Obama that are going to stun you and him and everybody else, and here come the midterms. But what’s going to happen in 2010 is gonna depend totally on whether or not the Republican Party’s grown a set and has the audacity to actually present an alternative rather than watered down sameness. So understand here, Faith, I love you, and I understand the garbage that your husband goes through, I’ve gone through it, and so has everybody else. It’s part and parcel of going to work every day in this country. We’ve all had reprobates and idiots that we’ve worked for. We’ve all also had great people that we end up working with. If you’re lucky you end up with great people you’re working with and working for. But those people aren’t going to find you. You have to be out there working and finding them. So please don’t misunderstand. We support the workers.
I have respect, love, and admiration for everybody in this country who gets up and goes to work every day. I don’t care where and what they’re doing. It’s the people that don’t work — who can, but don’t — who have entitlement expectations, you know, that’s a whole different thing. I have no sympathy for sob stories. We’ve all had them. We could all cry, every day, about something. We could all go through the day (crying) not fair! Welcome to life. The more you’re able to get in control of your own life and your own future, the happier you’re going to be. If you structure life, your life so that you’re always waiting for the next explosion to hit, if you’re always waiting for the next creep to pop up, it’s going to happen. You can be a person of action or you can sit around and wait and hope. And, remember, hope, outside the biblical term — don’t get confused here — hope is simply an excuse for doing nothing.