RUSH: We got one more Millennial piece here. Take me a little bit more time than I have now. Let me go back to the phones. It’s coming up. Sit tight. Here’s Dan in Warwick, Rhode Island. Great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Ah, great to be here Rush. This is amazing. It’s great to talk to you.
RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I’m just calling because I heard you at the beginning of the program saying that Millennials — and earlier this morning I’ve been thinking, I was like, “I gotta call Rush,” and I’ve been meaning to call you since the first day I called you back in 2008, and it was 2008 right about this time ’cause we were in the climax of the campaign, and I’m from Rhode Island, so I am a little blue state, and I was trapped in that liberal Democratic mindset. My friend actually, he said to me, “Oh, I know, Dan, I know your family is a whole bunch of Democrats, you know, but you got your thinking all wrong.” And I think it’s Reagan that said (paraphrasing), “You know, it’s not that liberals are stupid, it’s just that so much that they know is wrong.” And I can say honestly now that I was that kind of person. So much that I knew was wrong.
And I started listening to you, and I’ve listened to you every day since. And right after I started listening to you, the RNC was on — well, the DNC came on first, and I remember you saying that he is gonna, you know, Senator Obama at the time was gonna blame everything on Bush, and it wasn’t even like two minutes into his speech, he started blaming everything on Bush. So I turned that speech off and I waited until the RNC, and Governor Palin came out, and my fire just got lit for conservatism, and I changed my party right away. I joined the McCain and Palin campaign, and, you know, I knew I was late getting on the bus, but, you know, like you always say, you gotta get up and you gotta do something. You gotta act. You just can’t sit around.
RUSH: It doesn’t matter when you got here. The fact is, you got here. You arrived, and you stayed. See, that’s key. You’re a classic example. You keep doing it the way you’re doing it and you’re going to influence others along the way.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, folks, I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece at Forbes magazine by a Millennial. Her name is Maura Pennington. Maura Pennington is a contributor at Forbes, and she says here, “I write about my lost generation and liberty,” and her piece is quite good. It’s a further amplification of pretty much what I’ve been talking about recently about this generation.
It’s a funny piece in places, and I think it illustrates this fog I described, this fog of depression that has drifted in that’s making everybody feel … just not right. Something is wrong. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but things just aren’t right. “Millions Of Millennials Live at Home and Support the Policies That Keep Them There.” Now, she’s not in favor of that. That’s the point here. The real nut of this is toward the end of it, but let me share with you how Maura Pennington begins the piece.
“In Man’s Search For Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl discusses the ‘existential vacuum.’ It is an internal emptiness and lack of purpose. In a life with logos or meaning, anything can be endured. Without it, a person is lost. Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold onto.”
Without meaning…
Now, we all know everybody wants their life to have meaning. This is why… Well, this explains many things. Everybody wants to matter, and liberals use that to ensnare or entrap people. For example, a person who thinks they’re nothing or nobody because they’re not on television, because they’re not followed by a lot of people on Twitter, or because nobody cares about them like they care about the Kardashians or whatever. They want to matter, too! They want to matter.
So what do they do?
Well, they hear that they can save the world from global warming by, oh, buying a hybrid car, or not eating meat, and they become evangelists for this. It really is, in the case of young people, not so much they’ve adopted liberalism as an ideology. It’s more that they’re trying to grab on to something to give their lives meaning. They don’t want to wander aimlessly through life. Most people derive their meaning — particularly men…
Most people derive their meaning or their self-worth from their work. They can call it their “job,” put most people derive their self-worth from what they do. Because what they do is where there are achievements, and what they do is where there are accomplishments. Now, some people derive their self-worth from being parents. You’ve heard many people say, “The best thing I ever did was my daughter. The best thing I ever did was my son.”
I mean, people will grasp on to anything in order to think that they are important, that they stand out from the crowd, that they’re not just a faceless statistic. Now, sadly, that desire is capitalized on by the left in ways that actually end up demeaning people, as opposed to the conservative approach to those people, which inspires them to find out what it is they love and then get all the obstacles out of their way so that they can go give it a shot.
That’s what we believe.
We don’t look at people with contempt and say, “You know, they’re just the hoi polloi. They can’t do anything without us. They can’t do it without our help,” or whatever. We don’t treat people that way, and we don’t view people with contempt. We look at ’em and see their potential, and we want ’em to maximize it. We want people be happy. We want people to be what they were born to be, whatever it is. But if there’s no meaning then there’s nothing solid.
If you don’t have a religious belief, if you don’t have a faith in something larger than yourself, if you haven’t learned that life is about much more than just you, you’re gonna be miserable, ’cause you’re gonna be constantly searching for something that’s solid. A lot of people then glom on to Gaia or the global warming religion, a tree or a bush or some such thing. Mother Earth in toto. Back to Maura Pennington here.
“When the greatest excitement today for twenty-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia, or going on an endless string of meaningless Internet-facilitated dates, I have found myself surrounded by nihilists. Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves. Anyone with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle-age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning.
“The lost ones instead are those approaching thirty with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums,” meaning posting comments to blogs. She says, “The lost ones are smart. They pay attention to what goes on in the world. They read the news along with the lists of 37 GIFs. Yet what can they do?
“They have minimal discretionary income and their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that force them to look at backlit words for eight hours [a computer screen] or deal with whining strangers. They are fully adults and can’t boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication,” meaning they’re not doing as well as their parents. “I hear my peers say, ‘I’m lost.’
“I say, ‘Yes, of course.’ Almost 22 million twenty-somethings live with their parents, myself for the second time currently included, though economists tell us that this is technically a ‘recovery’ from a ‘recession’ and not just one long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth…” See, what she’s saying here is she and her cohorts are being told that we’re in a recovery, and they know they’re not. They know this isn’t a recovery!
They’re in a “long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they could have had an apartment by now.” All these expectations they had, they haven’t realized them. The economy is not there for ’em. They all voted — or 60% of ’em voted — for Obama, thinking that this magic was gonna happen. They bought the hype. They bought the lies.
They bought the salesmanship of the Obama campaign. He was an empty canvas! “Paint him! Whatever you want him to be, he is. Whatever problem you’ve got, he’s gonna solve. Whatever problem there is, his existence is gonna fix it.” And they’ve grown to realize that they’re waiting around for other people to do this magic, and it hasn’t happened, and rather than lose faith in Obama, they’re losing faith in the country, and that’s a little bit of the Limbaugh Theorem.
She even gets close to my heart by talking about how her parents never had an allergy to bread, but now all of a sudden everybody can’t eat gluten, for crying out loud! So basically what she’s saying there is that her generation is creating their own set of traumas to deal with. There wasn’t in rash of gluten-free products that their parents needed to have. Listen to this paragraph:
“It’s not that this lost segment of a generation made themselves willfully nihilists. Life is crowded and getting stricter. Whereas other generations might have persevered, they enjoyed less traffic and fewer regulations. They could visit Disneyland without timed tickets for rides or climb Yosemite’s Half-Dome without a permit. They could smoke cigarettes on their college campuses without nanny classmates and university bureaucrats shaming them into special areas.
“They lived in an era where vaccinations for lethal diseases weren’t up for debate and no one was allergic to bread. We, on the other hand, exist in an age in which the state explains booster seats at SaferCar.gov and female bullying at GirlsHealth.gov.” She’s making the point that in previous generations, if you wanted to smoke, you smoked. Now you got a bunch of people saying, “No! You can’t do that. You gotta go here, gotta go there.”
You gotta go to a government website to learn how to take care of your kid in a car. You gotta go to a government website to keep yourself from being bullied by girls. You’re helpless, you’re dependent, you can’t do anything without government! That’s what this generation is being told. She doesn’t like it. “Perhaps people could find purpose on the day they stop buying multiple bicycles and instead own a car.”
I couldn’t agree with that more. We have way too many damn bicycles on the streets. But that’s just a personal preference. “The problem then,” though, if you buy a car, “becomes parking, guilt about the environment, and deeper existential angst.” I tell you, she’s right on the money here, folks. They have been guilt tripped! Buy a car; they’re destroying the planet. Buy a car; can’t find parking. Buy a car; you’re congesting the planet. Buy a car; you are destroying the environment and you feel guilty as a result.
Who wants that?
So go buy a bicycle and you peddle around to nowhere.
“People could start an affinity group of some kind, since one in four Millennials has no religious affiliation,” and no religious affiliation means no meaning in life. No religious affiliation means no faith in something larger than yourself. That’s unhealthy. “Americans could stop supporting anti-growth politicians pushing agendas that strangle the economy, weaken the dollar, and surreptitiously erode civil liberties, but let’s be serious: 60% of those ages 18-29 reelected President Obama.
“So, what’s left? … Frankl would tell the lost ones to find a will to meaning in this world, but finding purpose can be put off, even if the abyss persists and they pester the rest of the world as impotently self-involved non-starters, for lack of ever finding a self or a start.” She says in the ending paragraph: “Be someone who solves the harder puzzle we’ve been given. Consider that this isn’t the first time young people have faced a sluggish economy and then investigate what made growth possible in the past.”
There is where I would say: “Maura, you direct ’em in your next column in Forbes to the 1980s, because this is right on the money.” You know every young generation thinks it’s doing things that other generations never had to face. “It’s harder than you had it, Mom and Dad. You just don’t understand.” And yet Mom and Dad do. So Maura here is suggesting that maybe you realize, you Millennials, this is not the first time young people have had it tough.
And maybe go back into history and find out what made economic growth possible in the past — and I’ll give you a hint. There’s something about the eighties that led to economic growth, and it was so powerful that it continued into the nineties. So, Maura, with your follow-up piece here, pick up on this where you ended this piece and direct them to the 1980s and give them the stats, give them the tax rate reductions, and give them the rate of growth, and give them the number of jobs being created, and give them all of it!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, folks, I want to reiterate something here that I said. I kind of glossed over it but I think it’s pretty important if I say so myself, and even for me. I’ve been trying to figure out, why don’t these Millennials — I mean, they voted for Obama — why do they not associate Obama, beyond the Limbaugh Theorem, why do they not associate him with the malaise and the depression? Here’s the answer to it, and it is devastating.
People are losing faith in the country, not Obama. Folks, if you find yourself talking to a Millennial or anybody else who’s down in the dumps and depressed about the country, understand they may just have lost faith in the country, when in fact it’s Obama that’s causing this. The country’s fine if we get rid of the people that are running it right now. That has got to be reinforced. We can’t allow people to say they have lost faith in the country, but that’s what I fear is happening. This is too important, and I think it’s something that I glossed over in previous commentary about the Millennials here.
I thought about it during the break, and Obama, in fact, even trying to convince people that this level of unemployment, the lack of a future, this is the new normal. That the past, when America was robust and great, that was fake. That was unjust. That was brought about by an unjust, immoral founding. Now we’re getting this is the way it was always intended to be, and you are gonna have to deal with it. And that’s just not so. This cannot be allowed to be the new normal. We’re not gonna put up with it. We cannot allow people to have lost faith in America. That’s a little bit of an expansion on the Limbaugh Theorem. They’re still not holding Obama accountable for it, and that has to change.
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