RUSH: Here’s Mary in Killeen, Texas. Mary, thank you for waiting. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Pretty good. Thank you.
CALLER: Listen, I’m a first-time caller, and I wanted to call because my husband was killed in Iraq in 2004.
RUSH: Oh, jeez.
CALLER: And it’s really, really upsetting me seeing time after time these stories about people pooping on the flag, burning the flag. Regular citizens can’t fly their flag because their pole is too high or their homeowners insurance says they can’t have it in their district or keep getting fired because they got a lapel pin on.
RUSH: Or you have to fly the Mexican flag.
CALLER: That’s right, or recite the anthem for Mexico. It’s really upsetting to know that my husband and so many others died defending the American flag and how patriotic feelings are just dying in this country, and it —
RUSH: Why do you think that is?
CALLER: I don’t think people respect what’s going on because, first, it starts at home, then it starts at the schools. I worked for the school district for a very long time, and to get the kids even to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning is a struggle. We don’t teach American history. Most kids don’t have any idea what happened during colonial times. It’s very upsetting, and it’s like when I was a child, we learned all this at school. I grew up in Ohio, and now I live here in Texas, and it’s just all changed. It’s like they don’t have time for it in the curriculum —
RUSH: No, no, no, no. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. The agenda today is that America isn’t all that wonderful stuff. You and I were taught lies. America, we were an imperialistic, racist, bigoted country. We became a superpower by conquering innocent people and stealing their natural resources and using it ourselves and we became this giant militaristic power that worked our way around the world, our CIA killing people left and right. We never were that great country. The people in charge of the education agenda in high school, junior high, middle school, college, that’s what they believe. I mean listen to what some of the people at the Occupy Wall Street protests are saying, the attitudes they have about the country.
CALLER: It just makes me sick to see those reports. If they only knew — and I just wanted to let your listeners know that families like myself, it’s very hurtful to us. It really is. And I’m a very private person and I don’t like to do this kind of thing in public, but I’ve had enough, Rush, and I can’t take it any more. I don’t like what people are doing to this country and what they’re doing to our values.
RUSH: It’s going to keep up. I don’t foresee a day where it vanishes. There’s always going to be, even if it ultimately is a tiny minority, you’re still going to have people with the attitudes that so offend you and they’re still going to get media coverage. And people that join the military, they know what’s up, protecting that freedom, to think and say those things is what it’s all about, it cuts both ways. I’m not defending them, don’t misunderstand, it infuriates me, too. And it can be as well as infuriating, painful. You scratch your head. I ask myself every day, I don’t understand how there can be one person that hates this country. Maybe somebody wrongfully imprisoned for 25 years. But that would be a specific rather than an institutional thing. I intellectually don’t understand it. But my mind wasn’t polluted. My mind wasn’t perverted.
I wasn’t taught what a rotten place this country is. A lot of kids have been and are being. I think it’s probably even worse than what you think. It’s probably more widespread than what you would believe. It is happening and it’s primarily an educational problem. People that have control of the education system are using it summarily to teach lies about this country and to dispirit people from thinking there’s anything unique or exceptional or special about America, that we don’t deserve this, we’ve gotta now pay our price, we gotta pay our dues. That’s what cutting our economy down to size is all about. We find out what the rest of the world has to live like because of us. That’s the agenda that’s being taught today among many other things. Glad you called.