RUSH: George in Greensboro, North Carolina, as we start the phones today. Hi, George. Great to have you. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush, I grab on the air, and giga dittos.
RUSH: You’re welcome, sir. Thank you. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Sir, I’d just like to make a comment defending what you called the coddle generation and point out the fact that they are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq without any complaints or any protests, unlike the Baby Boomers in Vietnam who I think is the actual coddled generation.
RUSH: Well, now, you know, the coddled generation is not universal or monolithic just like the Baby Boom wasn’t. I mean, I’m a Baby Boomer —
CALLER: I understand.
RUSH: But not all Baby Boomers were sixties protesters, and not all Baby Boomers are me, myself, and I first kind of people, and not everybody your age is coddled. All I mean by it is we’ve now reached the point where adults, young adults that are entering the world do come from a public education curriculum where they were coddled; where they didn’t keep score; where there was no winners and losers, and there were no humiliations if you lost or any of that. And if anybody said anything mean they were sent home and if somebody pointed their finger at you as a gun they got sent home and so forth. All that’s coming to roost now as these people get into the real world and find out that they’re not protected and they’re not coddled, and people are people and life is life.
CALLER: I’m not gonna argue with you on that, but maybe you should refer to them as the children of the coddling generation.
RUSH: Refer to them as the children of the coddling generation. Okay, whatever. I’m not trying to — you’re offended. You’re from the coddled generation. You’re sitting out there thinking I’m talking about you. And you’re probably a he-man, self-reliant rugged individual guy, and you don’t like what I’m saying, right?
CALLER: That is absolutely correct.
RUSH: That’s exactly correct. Well, the coddled generation, not everybody fell for it. The public school system didn’t get everybody. Every generation has its rebels. I’m not gonna moderate, modify, otherwise change what I’m saying here. I don’t think there’s any question about it. You can see the product of public school education as people grow up and enter the workforce. You can see the way they’ve been taught, the way they’ve been educated. It’s a question of whether or not you want to admit it or not.
It’s undeniable that the left and the multiculturalists have had control of the public school curriculum. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and the multicultural assault began on this country way before I started this program. It’s been something I’ve been talking about since the mid-eighties, even before this program started, and it does affect people. It does influence young kids, the way they grow up and the way they think and the way they think life is outside their protected environment.
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RUSH: On this coddled generation business, you know, I’m a Baby Boomer, and I can tell you, I don’t know about… Well, yeah, I can pretty much say that of the people I knew growing up, which was in a small Midwestern town, nobody was coddled. But the Baby Boom generation did coddle its kids, does coddle them or did, and I don’t know why. I mean, you can maybe think about it. “Well, crime was rising and there became a little bit…”
Like my parents were never afraid to let us go play outside all day! There was no need for anything like the Amber Alert or any of that kind of thing. But most of the people I know of in my generation were not coddled. I certainly wasn’t. Jeez. I have used this phrase often, but I’ll basically just review it very quickly. I think the Baby Boom generation had to invent its traumas to tell itself how tough life was.
As children of the World War II generation, our parents and grandparents, now, they had it tough — at least the way I look at it. They had the Great Depression, they had World War II, they had Korea. They took very seriously when Khrushchev comes over, bangs the shoe and says, “We will bury your grandchildren!” They took it seriously. When they were in their teenage years, they knew that the world was about much more than just them, that there were things larger than themselves.
Hillary Clinton, for example, a Baby Boomer, admitted she didn’t realize that ’til she was in her forties. I think that Baby Boomers had to go out and invent all of these traumas. Oh, they had crappy technology. I saw a graph over the weekend. Aw, jeez, I didn’t print it; I don’t have it right in front of me. But it’s a stunning graph about technology. The telephone took decades to reach 90% saturation. The smartphone, the iPhone, has reached full saturation in the country in two years, as opposed to 30.
The technological differences are vastly different from what the Baby Boomers had and compared to what their parents and grandparents had. So I don’t think as a kid I had it anywhere near as tough as my dad did growing up, or his father. That’s just an honest assessment. When my dad was 40, that was it. His life was set, and in his mind it was set — and back then if you hadn’t done what you were gonna do by 40, it wasn’t gonna get done. It was just the way things were.
It was also true that they didn’t let you earn any money until you were 40 in those days. You had to show your worth, you had to prove your responsibility before anybody would pay you any serious money. It took a long time to become successful. All of that’s changed now, it’s different, and I’m a talking about trying to go back to that. I’m just cataloging the differences. But I don’t think there’s any question, folks, that the public school curricula and…
I mean, these things, we always laughed at ’em when they were happening. We’d hear about a school that had a football team that beat its rival 55 to nothing so they stopped keeping score. We laughed about it, but the fact is it happened, and it happened in a lot of places, and it obviously had influential aspects to it. We were laughing at it. I was laughing. “Oh, that’ll never become mainstream.” But it has, is the point.