RUSH: All right, to the phones, to Hopewell, New York. Brian you’re next, nice to have you, sir.
CALLER: Rush, good morning. Thank you for having me on.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: Hey, your assessment of optimism is right on target. I’m a motivational expert and author, and I can tell you with no doubt that people’s attitude totally affects what their success or failure in life is. And one of these things on Thanksgiving is that people don’t really come to terms with how much we have in this country or what the level of abundance is. And as such, we’re so comfortable that people have the luxury of finding things to be upset about, when if you compare our country to anyplace else in the world, we have such an easy time here.
RUSH: Exactly right. You have nailed it: Abundance. It is a word not used enough in describing this country, and people’s individual lives. Not just material things — an abundance of freedom, an abundance of opportunity, an abundance of things to be thankful for. But, if there’s no consciousness of this, then there can’t be any gratitude.
CALLER: No, that’s so true. Instead of people being thankful for the abundance, they focus on what’s lacking in their lives.
RUSH: Right. And the reason they do is because they’ve got so much time. They’ve got so much time to think about themselves, oh, woe is me, some of them do.
CALLER: Right. And the reason they have so much time is because they have such an abundance, that they don’t even appreciate.
RUSH: I know. You’re exactly right. I’m glad you called to confirm what I said.
CALLER: Yeah, and I think one of the important things, you know, you have this show about Thanksgiving, is that this should be a touchstone to remind people that really every day they need to have an attitude of gratitude and really be thankful for all the things in their lives that they are blessed with, and there really is nothing that’s too small, even just waking up in the morning — because there’s some people who don’t.
RUSH: You know, people are going to hear you say that and go, ‘Come on, get real, I’m not a Miss America pageant contestant, what do you mean, be thankful for getting up in this country, come on, that’s so filled with…’ People don’t want to appear to be sappy. You don’t have to articulate your thankfulness, just feel it.
CALLER: Right. You don’t have to tell anybody, it’s just going through a mental checklist every morning of all the things that are good in your life.
RUSH: Let me ask you a quick question here before I let you go. You said you’re a motivational expert.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: One of the things I’ve discovered I just want you to confirm, because I know this is right. Most people, for whatever reason — you may know, given that you’re a trained professional here — most people are predisposed to pessimism and thinking the worst is going to happen.
CALLER: Absolutely. And they get this way for a number of reasons. First of all, the examples they see growing up, the examples in the Drive-By Media, and just talking to all their friends and acquaintances, and because of their negative orientation, it puts a damper on the amount of success that they’re going to achieve.
RUSH: I remember when I was growing up in this business, and I would ask people who had succeeded in it and who hadn’t succeeded in it what they thought I should do. I finally stopped talking to the people who had failed, because I figure, what have they got to teach me? They were negative. ‘Oh, don’t go into that business. It’s going to eat you up and spit you out. A bunch of charlatans in this business, you don’t want to mess with it, you can’t make it.’ And since, having learned that, I’ve always counseled people, whatever it is they want to do, ‘Talk to people who have succeeded in that field, or are successful in it, for your motivation.’
CALLER: Right. That’s also right on target. If you want to do something, talk to someone who’s already done it. If you want to become a pilot, you talk to a Chuck Yeager, you know, you talk to someone who’s the best in your field who’s done exactly what you want, and they have something to teach you. It’s the people that are naysayers, that fail, that tell you all the reasons why something won’t work.
RUSH: And they’re out there in great numbers. Because the success of others threatens individuals, and it’s a shame. It’s a shame more people are not oriented toward to the optimistic. But I appreciate your call. Thank you. We’re working on that here, by the way. I think we’ve had profound impact on people’s lives in that regard, by the way.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more thing. This is an interesting thought here. We can talk about optimism and pessimism and gratitude, thankfulness, for all that we have as Americans. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it if against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and the affluence of an imagined future. One of the reasons that people who are so mired in pessimism do so is because they’re sitting around thinking how much better it could be, how much better it will be if, say, Hillary Clinton’s elected, rather than looking backward, measuring what happened in the past. It’s what I tried to do in the first hour. I don’t care what you think of your circumstances today, they’re better today than they were five years ago; they’re better today than they were ten years ago; they’re better than they were 20 years ago, no matter how far back in history you go.
Ten years from now things are going to be better in this country than they are today. There’s a caveat. I genuinely believe, you know, people talk about the crisis of oil, the price of gasoline, it is what it is. But I’m going to tell you something, folks, if Mrs. Clinton gets elected and she gets a Democrat Congress, then this country faces a tremendous amount of pressure, because those people want to rebuild it. This is the last gasp of the sixties anti-war generation to grab hold of this country, to embrace it, put their arms around it, and bend it, and shape it, and flake it, and form it into their image, which is one of socialism. There’s no cushy way to put it, and that is socialism, central statism, an expanding government that’s running health care and everything else, that can kill temporarily the progress in the golden goose that is the United States of America.