RUSH: Now, the tradition and institution, the next one under assault…
I know you’re gonna laugh, but don’t because it’s in the Washington Post. Here’s the headline: “Flowers May Be Nice for Mom, But They’re Terrible for Mother Earth.” “Jennifer Grayson, an environmental journalist, is writing ‘Unlatched,’ a book about the breastfeeding controversy,” and has a piece in the Washington Post saying we need to get rid of the entire industry of flowers on Valentine’s Day and for Mother’s Day or any other occasion because flowers are contributing to climate change.
“How’s this as a gesture of love for the woman who bore you?” This is how the story begins — and, for those of you in Rio Linda, it doesn’t mean “bored.” This is… Let me reread this: “How’s this as a gesture of love for the woman who [gave birth to] you? Chop off the reproductive organ of a plant and send it to her in a box tied up with a pretty bow,” because that’s what you’re doing. You’re mutilating a flower!
You are chopping off its reproductive organ — imagine if that happened to you — and then you are wrapping that in a bow and putting it in a box and sending it to your mom? “No, it’s not a weird botanical twist on the van Gogh woo-a-girl-with-a-severed-ear legend. It is what millions of us … will compulsorily do to mark Mother’s Day.” This ran last week. “This year, we will spend a collective $2.4 billion to buy Mom flowers. I understand the appeal.
“I’m a mom of two little girls, and my heart melts anytime they surprise me with a handful of dirt-clumped dandelions from our backyard. But while giving flowers may seem like a good way to show how much you love your mom, it’s a terrible idea if you care about Mother Earth.” Now, you might think, “Come on, Rush! This is never gonna get any traction.” That’s what everybody said about everything the left is succeeding in changing, altering, our destroying.
How many of you, ten years ago…? Let’s go back three years, when Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, every prominent Democrat was opposed to gay marriage. Go back 10 years. How many of you ever thought that marriage would someday successfully be defined — and be considered cool and hip — as between two people of the same sex? When did you think that the majority of the American people, at least in certain polling data produced, supports that?
Do you remember the efforts that the Sierra Club made to go after SUVs? And those efforts are still underway. Some of the most crackpot, cockamamie things — that when the left makes a move on ’em, everybody laughs and thinks they’re kooks and wackos and extremists. — they stick with it, time passes, and all of a sudden it becomes reality. And here’s the first marker thrown down on flowers. Look, they’re going after beef!
They’ve been going after beef and McDonald’s for I don’t know how long, on the premise of global warming, and they keep inching closer, folks. They are stigmatizing beef eating, stigmatizing beef production, and there’s no push-back. Nobody stands up and tells me them to shut up. Nobody tells them to mind their own business. They just keep inching forward. They don’t do so with any timeframe or time-demand limit.
If it takes ’em 15 years to get it done, so be it.
They don’t ever consider failure. If they haven’t succeeded in two years, they never drop it and move on to something else. They keep plugging away. “This year, we will spend a collective $2.4 billion to buy mom flowers. I understand the appeal. … But … it’s a terrible idea if you care about Mother Earth. … The truth is that most flowers are organic only in the truest sense of that word: highly perishable and thus susceptible to decay, as well as vermin and disease.
“Up to 80% of the 5.6 billion stems of flowers sold in the United States each year are imported. Of those, 93% are grown thousands of miles away in production greenhouses in Colombia or Ecuador. And it takes an awful lot of energy and artificial tinkering to keep those flowers fresh. First, they are saturated with a toxic cocktail of chemicals, many of which have been restricted or banned outright in the United States and Europe…
“To preserve the blooms once they’re cut, they’re stored in an energy-guzzling refrigerated warehouse, flown via cargo plane to the United States, brought to yet another refrigerated warehouse to await distribution, and — just to tack on a bit more to the carbon footprint — shipped via refrigerated truck to your mom or to the refrigerated display case at the supermarket or florist. …
“Add in the cellophane wrap, those annoying little plastic stem tubes and the bouquet’s fate a week later, emitting methane in a landfill, and you may have gotten a gift with a bigger carbon footprint than if you’d driven four hours in a Hummer to visit Mom in person.” So there you have it, the first marker thrown down, in the Washington Post. Flowers for Mother’s Day is a waste; it is damaging. It’s leading to climate change and global warming.
I know everybody’s just gonna laugh. “What a bunch of crackpots! What a bunch of kooks! They’re never gonna do anything on this.” And you might not hear anything about this ’til next Mother’s Day. You might not hear about this for two years. But I guarantee you: The marker’s been thrown down. This will become part of the mix to persuade you and anybody else they can persuade to support their idiocy in global warming, climate change, and get you to abandon it.
The real root of this: Anti-capitalism, folks.
There’s just too much money being made, too much money being spent, blah, blah.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Oh, yeah, there’s all kinds of stuff out there. I just wanted to get to this rose business, this flowers business, because, folks, it’s typical. You may not think it’s the most important thing happening out there. But over 27 years, it’s little things like this that people ignore and pay no attention to that allows the leftists to creep and creep and creep and then one day we wake up, and they have destroyed something, in the process of taking it over.