RUSH: Here’s Heather in Williamsburg, Virginia. Great to have you on the program, Heather. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, I just wanted to tell you I had a little experience of Millennial outreach this week because you encouraged me to do that.

RUSH: Well, cool, I can’t wait to hear this.

CALLER: Well, I managed to get myself elected to the school board a year and a half ago and I’m having fun with that, and I had an orthodontist appointment and always have a bunch of paper to review and I brought it ’cause I knew I’d have to wait. And the 20-something assistant said to me, “Wow, that’s a lot of paper.” And I said, “Yeah, I have a meeting tonight.” And I said, “But the great thing is that paper’s a renewable resource.” And she looked at me, and she said, “Are you kidding?” I said, “No, I’m not kidding.” I said, “Imagine if you guys did something to mess up everybody’s teeth, would you have repeat customers?” And she said no. And I said, “Well, foresters wouldn’t, either. We can’t make oil or coal or natural gas overnight, but we grow trees, we harvest them, we plant new ones and we grow trees and we harvest them.” And she said, “Really? That’s not what they told us in school. I never thought of that before.”

RUSH: Isn’t that amazing when you run into that?

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: And she’s right. People are taught that trees are not a renewable resource, and of course if you look, you know what one of the biggest lumber or tree companies is Weyerhaeuser, or they were. I don’t know if they’ve been eaten by some other company or merged, but Weyerhaeuser, they plant 10 times the number of trees that they cut down for paper.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: It’s their business. It’s their product. See, it seems to me common sense, so much of economics is common sense, but it’s so complicated and confusing to people. The idea that people would believe that trees or wood is not renewable.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: They see it growing every day of their lives.

CALLER: And we export a lot of paper from Virginia. Not only that, but we can recycle the paper, and we do. It’s one of the few things that actually make sense, so, I mean, that’s how I raised my kids. I have three Millennials, and I talk to them, they’re all conservative, and they get it, but I realize that in every situation I have to start a conversation, and I have to get people thinking. And that’s my mission, thanks to you.

RUSH: You know what, Heather, you’re exactly right. And the other thing you have to do, when you’re talking to a Millennial or somebody that’s rather youthful, assume, when you start out, that they know the exact opposite of the truth about most things. ‘Cause that’s what they’ve been taught. There might be exceptions to that, but just like this person you encountered that it was earth-shattering news to her that paper is a renewable resource, that trees can grow again. She never considered the opposite because she was taught the opposite. She’d been taught about how this country is evil and destroying its environment, causing global warming and so forth.

So you’re right, you’re gonna have to initiate the conversation or manipulate it so that they do, whatever, you gotta get the conversation going, and then it’s a sad thing to have to do, but you have to assume that they don’t know the basics, because they haven’t been taught the basics. It’s a great call. Heather, I’m glad that you got through.