RUSH: This is Vinny. Vinny in Opelousas, Louisiana. Hi, Vinny, great to have you on the program.
CALLER: (bad cell phone) Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I appreciate it. I’ve been listening since the early nineties, my college days. Longtime listener.
RUSH: You are. You’re almost a lifer.
CALLER: (chuckling) Almost. Look, there’s a whole… (silence)
RUSH: Hello. Testing, one, two. (echo) Did we lose you? Did we lose you?
CALLER: Hello. Can you hear me?
RUSH: Are you…? He’s on a cell phone. He’s going in and out. I’m gonna stick with it for just a couple minutes. Vinny, are you there?
CALLER: Yeah. Can you hear me?
RUSH: Yeah. I can hear you. Don’t move!
CALLER: Okay. I can talk to you about all kinds of things. I want to hit on one point today. Thank you for finally saying the economy is not the issue. Where I live, that is not the issue at all. The citizens of my town have no concern about going to work. They haven’t worked in years and don’t plan on looking for a job. So I think we’re gonna have to focus on other issues here than the economy. You’re absolutely right.
RUSH: Well, that’s a sad reality. He’s making my point. You know, you go back… I’ll go back to the story about my father. I remember the first time I got fired. (groans) Folks, you would have thought that I had — in perpetuity — dishonored the family name. That’s just something that you didn’t allow to happen. You just didn’t get fired. That was because of his conditioning coming out of the Great Depression. My father, in teaching me about life, told me that I should figuratively kiss my boss’s feet every day.
He said that I should make it a point to have a meeting with my boss every day to thank him for employing me, and that I should make that my number one objective: to let my boss know how appreciative I was of the job. Now, in my day, that’s how you became a slave at work. In my day, if you spent all your time telling the boss how grateful you were, the boss said, “I got a sap here. I’ll never have to give this guy a raise. This guy’s so happy to be here he’ll clean the floors and do whatever.”
You know, things change generationally. But I got fired, and it was the worst thing to happen, ’cause once you got fired nobody would ever hire you again. You were forever stigmatized! You got fired and you may as well write the scarlet letter on your forehead. That was it. I’ll never forget when I had to call and tell him that I got fired. All he could say was, “You got fired! You’re fired!” It was like “FIRED” was a title. It wasn’t, “You were fired,” it was, “You’re FIRED!” He spat it out.
It was the absolute worst news he coulda had, the worst thing that coulda happened. It proved everything he always thought in telling me I was gonna be a failure ’cause I didn’t go to college. And then I had to tell him six other times. (laughing) I had to tell him a total of seven times! But the point is there was… (interruption) My mom was not happy about it. But she thought he was being a little mean in the way he was dealing with me about it. She thought that I needed to be pep-talked and inspired rather than beat down.
Those were just child-rearing philosophical differences. Anyway, the point is that back in the Great Depression, there wasn’t any welfare. You got fired and there wasn’t anywhere to go. It was painful. It was painful psychologically. It was painful. If you cared what people thought about you, it was one of the worst things could happen to you. And of course economically, you had to depend on family, church, or what have you for survival.
My only point is it’s not that way today, and that’s all this guy is saying. Most of the people where he lives don’t work, but they’re eating. These are transformations that have been slow in coming, and they’re occurring so slowly that they’re not causing a national outrage.