RUSH: John in upstate New York. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. I’m glad you waited, if you did. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. My question for you today is, what do you think the Founding Fathers and the Greatest Generation would think of our response to COVID-19?
RUSH: Oh, man, I love these kinds of things, questions because they’re fascinating to speculate and talk about ’cause there’s no way of really knowing. But the Founding Fathers, your question basically can be broken down to something along the lines of people alive today have no concept of hardship.
If you want to compare it to the Founding Fathers and that era and people who lived in that era or even the Greatest Generation — which is a generation of people that beat back the Japanese and the Germans in World War II and in some cases went on to Korea, had to deal with the building Cold War, the Soviet Union threat. They had to grow up real fast.
They had to learn in their mid-teenage years that life was about much more than just them. Hillary Clinton didn’t have to learn that ’til she was in her sixties, for example. Here’s the thing about the question. If you have the population, which is told that there is a virus out there that can kill you if you just look at it, you can kind of understand people being afraid of it.
And that’s how the American people have been informed about this virus. So I don’t think the initial reaction to it is all that unreal or unusual or hard to understand. We were told that there is this killer thing out there, that there’s no vaccine for, that nobody’s ever seen this — and then you combine that with the first videos that we saw coming out of China.
People wearing hazmat suits that we didn’t even know existed, people being grabbed up out of their homes and tossed in the back of vans and taken who knows where to be disposed of lest they spread the virus. So really, I think your question comes down to, in kind of a convoluted way… (big sigh) It actually is more complicated than this.
But how are people supposed to deal with panic presented to them in the media? Because that’s exactly what this was. I actually think, John, it would be easy to say, “Well, we’re a bunch of wimps compared to the founding fathers. Oh, there’s no question we’re a bunch of wimps compared to the Greatest Generation, the World War II generation.”
But I don’t think it would be fair to say that in a blanket statement. Because people in the early stages of this did not react to it unreasonably. They were lied to about a number of elements, but they didn’t react to that irrationally.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The previous caller. I was thinking during the break, “Would you compare — or what would the Founding Fathers say about our reaction to this virus and what would the Greatest Generation say about it?”
It’s a little bit of a misleading question. It depends who our talking about. If you talk about let’s go to New York and look at the doctors and nurses and the EMTs — virtually everybody in the health care industry. Many of them worked 24/7, certainly seven days a week. Many of them worked without much pay, many of them put themselves directly in the line of fire surrounded by people who had this virus.
I mean, there are a lot of acts of courage amongst the doctors and the nurses and the emergency personnel. Because at the time, remember what was being said. It was the most contagious disease. It was deadly. The usual scare tactics were being employed and thrown around. And yet… I mean, there was idle chat about some doctors or nurses going on strike.
It didn’t happen. They showed up. So in that group of people, you’ve have to say the Greatest Generation would have been very proud of them. Probably the Founding Fathers as well would have been very proud. As is the usual case. In the case of U.S. military, it’s 1% of the population volunteering or serving in ways that 99% would never do — and it’s the same thing here.
What tiny percentage of Americans actually were in the health care field who then showed up to treat patients in New York? I’m sure the same thing happened in New Jersey. So there would be many people that would call that activity valorous.
And a lot of them were not getting paid. Certainly not fully paid. Medicare reimbursements were few and far between.