RUSH: Let me get started here with this Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. “A study by researchers at Stanford University found that American millennials face challenges unlike any previous generation, and their struggles are likely signs of mounting issues due to decades of rising economic inequality in the U.S.
“Millennials, individuals born between 1980 and 2000, earn less money without college degrees than their predecessors and are more likely to die by suicide or drug overdose than any other generation.
“’Millennials are the first generation to experience in a full-throttled way the social and economic problems of our time,’ says David Grusky, professor of sociology and director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, in a statement. ‘We can think of them as canaries in the coalmine who reveal just how toxic those problems are. By assembling a report that provides a comprehensive understanding of their situation, we can go beyond the usual patchwork policy and begin to address underlying problems.’
No wonder they’re going nuts. They’re depressed. That’s the stuff they’re measuring? Let me read this again. “The study examined comprehensive data explaining integral factors in economic success or struggle.” Here are the factors Millennials supposedly face in economic success or struggle.
Education. Yeah, that’s new. Haven’t had that problem before. Employment and income. Yeah, nobody’s had pressure in that area before. Health? Yeah. Yeah. This is the first generation to get sick. Occupational segregation? Yeah. Yeah. The Millennials, they’re the first people to ever be separated. They don’t know how to deal with it.
Economic mobility. I don’t know what that means. They’re being forced to move or they don’t want to move, but whatever, I guess it’s the first generation ever that’s had to deal with it. Debt. Do you know that Millennials are the first generation to have to deal with debt? That’s what it says here. Comprehensive data explaining integral factors in economic success or struggle. Debt.
Remember the story, “Millennials Face Greatest Hardships From Toxic Economic Conditions.” And they are poverty rates. Well, poverty has never been better. I mean the poverty rate, we’ve never had fewer people in poverty. The people in poverty are doing well, better than they ever have. I guess Millennials in poverty are on the sidewalk. I don’t know.
Racial and gender identity. Now, this I will admit could be something unique to Millennials. Not knowing if you’re white, black, brown, red, male, female, or both. That could be unique. And it might be a problem. You don’t know if you’re man or woman. You don’t know if you’re child or adult. You don’t know if you’re Caucasian or black, like Rachel Dolezal. You don’t know if you’re part native Indian like Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas.”
You don’t know if because you have Jamaican roots that you have a tendency to opioid abuse, there’s a whole lot you may not know that you’re told. Uh, let’s see, what else. Social connections. Oh, by all means, Millennials are the first generation to have to face the daily possibility that they are insignificant because of social media. None of us ever before ever had to deal with inferiority complexes, I’m sure, right?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, back to this study. “Millennials Face the Greatest Hardships from Toxic Economic Conditions, Likened to Being Canaries in a Coal Mine.” You know what that means. The canaries in the coal mine, those are the guinea pigs. Those are the people we sent down there to die so that the miners wouldn’t die. If there’s anything toxic in the air, anything poisonous down there, then the canaries will go first, and we’ll know not to send people. This is what we’re doing with Millennials? Millennials are the canaries in the coal mine?
Now, I admit that, as a Baby Boomer, it can’t be easy for Millennials to follow our generation. Our generation is one of the most self-absorbed, me-first generations there’s ever been, because we were the first generation that had time to think about ourselves. We were the first generation that had time to do nothing but think about ourselves. We were the first generation to have so much time to devote to ourselves, we had to create — we had to invent — our own traumas to tell us that we were having tough times.
Most people are gonna have some kind of inferiority complex. Very few people have a superiority complex. And the more you think about yourself, the more introspective you get, the more problems with yourself you find — and the more help you think you need and the more that’s wrong with you. And then people like that started having kids, wanted to become best friends with their kids. They didn’t he want ’em to have any pain/suffering whatsoever. Hello, self-esteem. Hello, nobody loses. Hello, this or that.
Hello, there is no best team, there is no winner, there is no loser, there is no humiliation. Nobody’s feelings ever get hurt! Everything’s fine. Everything’s okay. “You’re great, you’re the best,” and then eventually life intrudes, and you find out you’re not great. You’re not the best. There are winners and there are losers, and you’re probably a loser more often than a winner ’cause you haven’t been taught how to win ’cause you’ve been taught, “Winning is not good. “Winning is mean! Winning is bullying!”
You add to that, I think, one of the biggest problems that our Millennial generation has had — and they don’t even know it — is the corruption of the American public education system and the takeover of the American university system by abject communists and socialists as revered faculty. I think Millennials have been pummeled with so much crap that they don’t know which way is up. Look at what they believe! They believe their parents and grandparents destroyed the planet. They believe that there may not be a planet habitable that will allow human life when they are 65.
That’s why Millennial men still get to pretend to be little boys and play with rockets. They fantasize about going to Mars to survive, whereas my generation outgrew the Steve Canyon, Clutch Cargo, Rocket Boy days with Elton John. But these people are still living ’em! So they’ve had their education corrupted. They have really been told their country is corrupt. They’ve been told their country is mean-spirited and selfish. They’ve been told and taught their country’s illegitimate. They’ve been told their parents and grandparents have destroyed the planet.
And they basically have been convinced that every Republican and every conservative on the planet is an ogre, is an idiot, and is a danger because they are racists and sexists. So, yeah, Millennials have been told whole bunch of stuff that’s true. They’ve been taught a bunch of lies. They have been exposed to a bunch of things that they are deathly afraid of that we’ve all had to grow up being afraid of. I mean, everybody is afraid for their place in life, everybody is afraid of success, everybody is afraid of finding it or not finding it.
I couldn’t wait to go out and strike out on the road to “making it,” whatever that was. I couldn’t wait. I was afraid of failure. But not really, ’cause I failed a lot. You kept coming back. But you’re always afraid of it, afraid of rejection, everybody’s afraid of things. You have to overcome those things. Fear is constant. I believe that anything that produces adrenaline can help you. You know what happens? When you’re bored you’ve got no drama going through your system. When you’re bored, you’re just basically flatlining.
Something happens to adrenalize you, you come to life. It’s very easy to get out of boredom. Do something that charges your adrenaline, even if it scares you or if it excites you or what have you. You can’t lose weight if you’re not having adrenaline go nuts in your system. Adrenaline is very telltale whatever it is. But a lot of people are raised to be afraid of adrenaline. “Adrenaline means the competitive spirits are getting going! Ah, we can’t compete. Competing isn’t good because competing breeds losers; it’s not fair.”
So, yeah, Millennials have been give an a lot of shackles. They have had a lot of shackles put around them, and they’ve been told that they are unique, they’ve been told that they’re facing things that nobody else ever has — which, of course, is foolish. But there are differences. I was thinking that, as I say, when I was growing up, folks… You know, my generation is blamed by Millennials for destroying the planet. This has always struck me strange.
They say we are destroying the planet you ’cause of our SUVs, ’cause of our rocket launches, because of our technological advances and our progress in the use of fossil fuels that we, their parents, are destroying the planet. But when I grew up, I grew up in a little house. It was not big, and there was one television set in it. There wasn’t a TV set in the kitchen. There wasn’t a TV set in bedrooms. There was not a TV set in the bathroom.
We did not have oodles and oodles of electrical outlets all over the wall to plug things in, because we didn’t have that many things to plug in. When you went to the grocery store, they gave you a brown paper bag that your groceries came in. You took that bag home and you used that bag for other things. You didn’t throw it away. You didn’t recycle it. Milk bottles. We had milk delivered on the front step every morning. Well, whenever it came.
I don’t know if it was every morning. The bottles were washed and sent back. We left the empties out, the milk guy came and got ’em, and they were recycled. Same thing with when soft drinks — Tab and Coca-Cola, Sprite, 7UP — came out with cans. Those things were recycled. The point is that we were not engaging in behavior the Millennials think that we were. They think they’re all green and energy healthy. I mean, they can’t hold a candle! Getting to school? I either… Look, this is not… I’m not trying to give you hardships.
I’m trying to draw a comparison here. I walked to school or took the school bus. But my mom did not pack the neighborhood in a gigantic SUV and take us to and from school like a taxi service every day. We didn’t have SUVs for one thing, so we couldn’t have been destroying the planet.
My brother and I had bicycles, rode ’em all over the place. I found a way to attach a radio to the handlebars so I could pretend I was driving in a car. You’d leave the house on a summer day at 8 o’clock in the morning and come back at five and your mom would say, “Why are you back so soon?” Not, “Gosh, glad you made it back alive, what did you do?”
The point is, this is not an old fuddy-duddy thing. I’m just telling you, all of the things that Millennials can’t do without, their devices, phones, pads, television sets everywhere, electrical outlets, chargers, cables, extra chargers, all this stuff that does what? Uses fossil fuels, we didn’t have any of that. We weren’t destroying the planet. They can’t get along without it. And that’s not a criticism. I use the stuff now too.
I’m just trying to draw a comparison of what they think they’ve got bad, what they think is canary in the coal mine stuff and they think is destroying the planet, their parents destroyed the planet with their profligacy and fossil fuels and stuff, it’s absurd. Yet they believe it.
Escalators. It’s another great example. Escalators were not common. There weren’t any malls when I was growing up. There were department stores and Main Street. The malls came in after I left town in my twenties.
As I say, people didn’t get in these gigantic cars to go short distances. We didn’t take the dog to the dog spa like happens today. Baby diapers? I’ve never had kids, thank God I’ve never had to deal with this, but there weren’t pampers and throwaways back then. There were diapers that you had to wash.
Oh. Do you know, my mom, for some of the time I was growing up, we didn’t have a washer and dryer. Well, we didn’t have a dryer. Hung stuff on a line in the backyard, and I got mad at it ’cause when that happened I couldn’t go out and play Wiffle Ball ’cause clothes had to dry. There was no dryer. There was a washer.
My point is, we weren’t using inordinate amounts of electricity or fossil fuels. It was au natural. It was what they claim to want to go back to. And I can tell you, you wouldn’t want to go back to it. Even people in poverty today have more TVs in their homes than middle school people did in the fifties and sixties growing up.
How many TVs in your house, Dawn? Off the top of your head. Maybe six. Right, same with mine. Well, I’ve got six in one room, but the point is growing up there was one TV. And it was not a gigantic 65-inch whatever it was, 8K monster. It was a little black and white thing that you needed a magnifying glass to see if you were sitting more than 10 feet from it, which everybody did. And it was black and white.
The decision to buy a color TV was something that took a lot of time because there were definitely ones that were better than others. And there were cheaper and more expensive, and then you had to decide what size screen you wanted because that was it. No. Don’t misunderstand. This is not an old fuddy-duddy complaint. I’m drawing a comparison. They tell us that we were destroying the planet. Their parents and grandparents were destroying the planet. Now they’ve gotta come along and fix it.
They’ve been filled with a bunch of garbage. Their heads have been really filled with a bunch of garbage. I just don’t think that they have been taught any perspective whatsoever. In the kitchen there was no grinding our own coffee. It was Folger’s out of a can. We didn’t have barroom blenders and stuff, you gonna bake a cake, you had to stir it manually. No, no, again, don’t misunderstand. Not saying the good old days were the bad. I’m saying that we didn’t have all this stuff. We had to invent it.
We had to invent it for the Millennials. We had to invent it for others that came along. Our generation did, ’cause we didn’t have it. And it was simple. Nobody complained about it, nobody felt inferior ’cause they didn’t have a gigantic color TV in every room. It’s just things were different. But the idea that somehow parents and grandparents of Millennials are destroying environment and destroying the planet and the only people that care about it are the Millennials and the greens today is just an absolute crock.
And, by the way, this is only if you acknowledge that their cockamamie belief that fossil fuels are destroying the planet, which I firmly reject. I reject the whole idea that fossils are causing a problem. Fossil fuels and their abundance and their affordability has revolutionized American lifestyles, lifestyles all over the country, revolutionized upward the standard of living has increased productivity everywhere you look, from individuals to corporations.
Now these people want to come along and take it apart and rip it apart and get rid of it because of some myth. But I’m just gonna tell you, I want you to stop and think. If you, from your earliest days of watching cartoons as a child, if you’ve been pummeled every day or almost every day, if you’ve been pummeled with the belief, with the theory, if you’ve been taught, you’ve been told, you’ve had people impress upon you that the earth is not gonna be here when you’re 65, for whatever reasons, if you believe that the planet is being destroyed by politics, political policies and certain lifestyles, if you’ve been taught that every day, it’s no mystery why you think it.
It’s no mystery why you believe it. They’ve been propagandized, brainwashed. Now they’re being told they’re canaries in a coal mine. Now they’re being told that this economy is really bad and it’s worse for Millennials because everybody’s got it in for Millennials. If you’ve been taught this kind of thing your whole life, it makes perfect sense you’d believe it rather than reject it.
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