Crisis ’09: Kids Fall in Bathtubs

RUSH: ‘More than 43,000 children head to the emergency room each year after slipping or falling in a bathtub, according to researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.’ Do you know what that works out to? That works out to 120 kids injured every day in a bathtub in the most prosperous nation on earth. Now, something needs to be done about this. Don’t know what, but something needs to be done. (interruption) Well, because it’s 43,000 kids hurt falling in the bathtub. (interruption) Bathtubs are. Maybe the bathtubs, I don’t know. (interruption) No, it’s not allowed for kids to get hurt. You’ve seen those stories, haven’t you? I remember when I was a kid, let’s see how much of this I can remember. When I was a kid, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, get up in the morning and leave the house at eight o’clock in the summertime, and the parents were happy to see you go, get outta here, kid.

You get on the bike and you’d go and they didn’t know where you were going, and you had no helmet. You had a deck of cards in the spokes to make noise, a little transistor radio attached to the handlebars so you could pretend you’re driving a car and you cruise around and sometimes you’d run through red lights, sometimes you’d run through stop signs risking it all that no car was coming. Sometimes you’d end up five miles away from home, parents didn’t know, didn’t care. You got home and told them what you did, they comment on it one way or the other. We’d fall off the bicycle, scuff up our knees. I remember one time my mother sent me up to the Snack and Pack, which was the convenience store, Snack Pack, I think it was, which is five blocks away. She sent me up there on my bicycle to pick up some stuff so that she wouldn’t have to go to the grocery store. She was busy doing something, playing with the dog.

So I went up there, and I got the sack of stuff, and I’m carrying the sack on the handlebars, and my left knee as I’m pedaling hits the sack and causes the front wheel to do a 90-degree turn, and I went head over heels onto the street, no helmet, no nothing, sat up, the stuff had fallen out of the sack, and I am mad as I can be. I’m probably 10. I’m mad as hell my mom made me do this. I didn’t have a basket on the bike so I had to carry that sack in the left hand on the handlebar. So I got home and told her what happened, and she said, ‘Stop whining and don’t worry.’ She ran and got some iodine and put it on the scuff on the knee and that was it. I remember playing baseball, youth league baseball at 12 and we had the screen backstop, as these little park baseball diamonds had. A wild pitch and I was a catcher and I scurried back to pick up the wild pitch and one of the prongs of the screen came out and cut my head and the coach said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and grabbed some dirt and rubbed it in it. ‘This is how we deal with it, son.’ I wasn’t crying. ‘Don’t worry about it, keep playing.’ Now, I guarantee you, none of that’s allowed to happen today.

We were fine. At the time, you know what we were worried about? We were worried about the Russians nuking us. Kids today are worrying about stupid polar bears dying or they’re worried about Bush lied. I don’t know what they’re worried about but they’re made to worry about a bunch of stuff. I’m just telling you that we know people fall in the bathtub all the time, kids, adults or what have you. But in this climate when this statistic — this is the Baltimore Sun, by the way. I won’t be surprised if somebody says, ‘We got to do something about this, we can’t have 120 kids falling and hurting themselves in bathtubs or showers every day in this country.’ But do you think that your average parent today will wave good-bye to the kid at eight o’clock in the morning on the bicycle and not care. No, they have to arrange play dates and the reason is there are molesters and all this other kind of stuff out there. Well, you might have had weirdos. Our weirdos were people we laughed at. We weren’t afraid of them.

Our weirdos were 90 years old driving down the middle of the street weaving in a 1920 car and then showing up at Wimpys, which is the local hamburger joint, to get a cup of coffee. We named this guy Gertrude Vangard. I never knew what his name was, but he was the funniest old little guy. Gertrude Vangard. We made fun of the local mortician. We weren’t afraid — (interruption) Well, that’s true, the schoolteachers weren’t having sex with us back then. It was different. Now, I’m not an old fogy and saying that let’s go back to those days. I promised I’d never be one of those, but I’m just telling you that we were allowed to be kids and grow up and have things happen that shaped us, and today no harm, no pain, no suffering is allowed, it’s not good, it stunts growth, kids today are not even allowed to compete. They secretly do, you know, when they tell these kids at T-ball you can’t keep score, they do, they know at the end of the game which team won. Even though it’s not officially done, people are naturally competitive. (interruption) Actually, I did have an experience with a bully when I was growing up, two of them.

I remember the first time I went home and told my mom or dad, whichever one, there was a bully in the school: ‘Well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do about it?’ rather than call the school and demand that something be done with the bully. Nobody called Congress or the state legislature to get bully legislation passed. It was much different, but of course back then the teachers also were not polluting our minds with ultra-radical leftism. Teachers were not requiring us to watch Algore movies and not telling our parents they had to come watch or we would fail the class. We didn’t have teachers who were giving us the answers to the tests in history so that the teacher could actually teach anti-Bush Republicanism while disguising successful history class with test scores that were made — that’s happening today. It’s happening today.

So I’m just telling you, something’s going to have to be done, bathtub falls, 43,000 kids a year, something’s gotta give here. Something has to give. Can you imagine somebody hearing the story today about rubbing dirt in an open wound on my head? Lawsuit, I guaran-damn-tee you, lawsuit. Sue the coach, sue the city for having a defective backstop and screen, and social services would have probably come and tried to take me away from my mother if I told them she made me drive to the Snack Pack and cut myself open on the bicycle ’cause the pack hit my knee and the wheel went 90 degrees and I went flying. And then they’d sued the bicycle maker or the store that sold it to me because they didn’t put a proper basket on the back to carry sacks from the Snack Pack, or whatever it was called. I think it was Pack and Snack. It’s where we went and got the baseball cards. Well, at any rate, folks, we gotta take a brief time-out. I’m just trying to avoid more Sonia Sotomayor sound bites with these stories, but there will be some after this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Tammy in Tucson. Tammy, nice to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: Fine. Thank you.

CALLER: Well, I heard you talking this morning about slips in the bathtub, and, you know, people going to the emergency room. And I used to be a nurse. I’m now a schoolteacher. And I would say conservatively probably 75% of the people that come into emergency rooms come in on a nonemergency basis, i.e., slips in the bathtub which are really not emergencies. Children throwing up, ticky-tack things, which, you know, contributes to our health care situation. And to prove my point, big U of A fan, University of Arizona, when the University of Arizona is playing when it’s football or basketball, the emergency room clears out, the hospital floors, there’s no lights being turned on, no one’s sick. So my point being that if you’re not sick when U of A is playing, you’re not really sick. So don’t come to the emergency room, don’t come to the hospital.

RUSH: I understand exactly what you’re saying. We’ve had this story, talked about it recently where nine people over six years visited a single Texas emergency room about 2,000 times. Some of them were illegal immigrants and so forth.

CALLER: We have a lot of that here.

RUSH: I’m sure you do. You’re a border state. But there’s a dichotomy to this because we can sit here and talk about the old days back when I was, you know, 12 years old, which would be more than 40 years ago, you can talk about that. But admittedly times were different then. We were not peppered every day with newspaper and TV stories about what was going to kill us. We were not peppered with the notion every day that if we don’t do that and don’t do that and don’t do that and don’t do that, we could live forever. We weren’t nearly as affluent then as we are today. A combination of media and affluence and medical advances. So if the kid does get a cough — remember, my grandparents on my father’s side lost a daughter, name was Marguerite, my father’s sister, she died at 13 because she scraped her arm on a nail, got lead poisoning, there was no penicillin. This is in the early 1900s. Life was tougher then. We can’t imagine something like that.

I scraped my head on a backstop and they poured dirt in it. I was fine, by the way, didn’t get infected. Dirt’s clean, very clean stuff, unless the animals have been on it, and they weren’t there. So today, people with their pets, people with their kids, first sign of a problem we can probably fix it now, plus people have been told all these things out there are going to kill them or hurt their kids or what have you, medical panic. I think health panic exists as a daily event in this country.