RUSH: Here’s Julie in Morristown, Tennessee. I tell you, great to have you as we go back to the phones. Hi.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. I appreciate you taking my phone call. I am the mother of three, a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old, and an 18-year-old. I’m glad I just ordered your hardcover and your audio book and look forward to it coming so we can enjoy it.
RUSH: Wow. Thank you.
CALLER: We’re excited about it. My husband and I, along with four other couples, about seven years ago founded in our community a K-to-12 Christian classical school. A core part of our curriculum is teaching history chronologically and accurately to our students, so they actually cycle through history chronologically three times by the time they graduate. In light of that, my oldest son, 18, graduated in May. He is now in college, and is quite skeptical. So my question for you is: How do we, as parents, practically inspire our young people?
RUSH: Now, wait, wait, wait, wait just a second. I need to understand what you just said.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Your 18-year-old is now in college after having undergone your curriculum?
CALLER: Yes, correct.
RUSH: You said he’s now “skeptical.” He’s skeptical of what? What you told him.
CALLER: No, he’s very skeptical of having any motivation to be involved in politics. “Can we make a difference?” You come out of the school and they learn how to think critically, how to think logically. They have a love for learning, yet they look at the masses of these low-information people who vote, and say, “How in the world can we stand against that? We don’t stand a chance.”
It doesn’t matter how much we know or how accurately we think we understand history. To him, it’s still like it’s ideology in that it’s just idealistic rhetoric; it’s not reality. They’ve experienced Obama and Bill Clinton. That’s been the reality that they’ve lived through throughout their childhood. That’s what they’ve seen and so there’s no motivation to get involved because it’s still like, “We can’t make a difference. There’s no choice against the masses of people who are uninformed and continue to vote.”
RUSH: Here’s what I would do.
CALLER: How do we inspire them?
RUSH: Well, if it were my child, the first thing I’d do is spank them for thinking this way after all that time you’ve taken to teach them. The first thing I’d do is spank ’em.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Then, I’d ask them if that changed their mind. If that didn’t… (interruption) Snerdley says, “Oh, no you just did it. You know the headline. ‘Limbaugh Advocates Corporal Punishment.'” No, seriously, what I would do is I’d sit them down and I would explain to them that this is a battle that has always gone on since the founding of the country, that liberty and freedom…
Even though it’s the spirit with which we are all born, freedom and liberty have to be guaranteed each and every day. It is always been the case — not always, but it’s common — that the masses are uninformed or misinformed. And that should just redouble their efforts to get involved and stay involved, because it’s their future, meaning your kids.
It’s their future and their country that they want to preserve as it is, as they grow up and as they begin to do their life’s work and have their own kids. If it’s worth preserving, it’s worth fighting for. It’s worth trying to educate the low-information people. It’s exactly what it is. It’s easy to be cynical and tune out, but if it really is important to them, if it really matters to them — and it should — then it needs to be something that they take on almost as a cause, in addition to whatever else their life’s work is.
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RUSH: Say, Julie, I know you’re still out there. I want to say one more thing. I think there’s something key to explain your 18-year-old who’s wavering. You said he went off to college. Okay, so you have treated him to an education based on your Christian and traditionalist curriculum, and then he gets to college and he finds out that it’s laughed at. He’s made fun of by his professors and by a lot of students, and he hears about the low-information crowd.
So he thinks, “What’s the point?” He probably sitting there thinking he’s in a minority, and he’s not hip and not cool because of all of this. So he’s thinking, “What’s it worth?” You cannot let the good foundation that you’ve laid here go to waste. He’s just at an age now — and a place, college — where what you’ve taught him is under assault. Everything he’s learned, he’s gonna be forced to question.
You need to sit him down and tell him that he’s under assault in this way and that the people doing this are really afraid of people like him for reasons that he may not understand. They don’t want limits on morality. They don’t want anybody being in charge of what’s right or wrong. They don’t value American traditions, and he does. He’s got to understand that, as such, they’re not interested in getting along with him. They’re not interested in learning what he thinks.
They wants to get rid of what he believes because it constitutes a threat to the little cocoon they’ve built for them to live in. His education means something, and at some point he’s gonna find people who are like-minded. A lot of these students that he’s with now will grow out of this. Not all of them, but a lot of them do as they get older. But, you know, motivating people is a challenging thing. It’s an individual effort, really.
There are some generic things you could do that would motivate and inspire people, but you know your son better than anybody else does, and I’m sure you know some of the things that have worked in motivating him. But you’ve somehow got to explain this to him. You’ve gotta explain the value of what he’s become and what he believes, to him and the country and everything else. He’s gotta almost become, you know, stiff spined and an evangel about it.
But it’s all about the kind of country he’s gonna grow into and have and perhaps lead one way or another, and then the best thing to do is say, “Look, I wasn’t wasting my time, Son. This stuff matters. It’s important. It’ll stand you well the rest of your life. It’s how you want to live,” and you have gotta assure him that he’s gonna encounter people just like that if he doesn’t give up on this.
He’s not gonna be surrounded by people that are threatened by him his whole life.