KEN: Today’s EIB High Note. It’s about an ordinary American doing an extraordinary thing. When I saw this story I was so energized because it seems like everybody has a great bus driver story. They come in all shapes and sizes. Bus drivers. And Rhode Island bus driver Eldorada or “Ellie” Giblin was driving a route last month when she spotted a man on a bridge who appeared to be preparing a jump. She stopped her bus immediately. She got out.

Giblin said immediately people just had their phones out and were taking pictures and video. She said, that broke my heart. I told passengers not to worry and that I would be right back. Ellie approached the man, who yelled, “No one cares. They just don’t care.” She told him she cared and, as proof, she invited him to join her on her next break from work. The man pulled away from the railing, she made him pinkie swear that he would not harm himself. When she returned to her bus, the passengers broke into applause. Ellie is not only one of those individuals Rush spoke of who make the country work, she is also one of those individuals who make it better. And things like this happen every single day in this country. Here’s Rush.

RUSH: What is American exceptionalism? It’s not that we’re better people. It’s not that we’re smarter. It’s not that we have the advantage because of our geography, because we clearly don’t. So what is it that sets us apart? There’s one answer, and it’s found in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We are all endowed by our Creator.’ So we acknowledge God as a country. When we were founded, we acknowledged God: We were all created. We are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Undeniable. They’re just there. And they come from the Creator. Among them, but not just, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

That’s pretty simple to me. Those three things, the acknowledgment of our creation by God — a loving God — that our spirit has this natural yearning to be free and to be happy and that there’s nothing wrong with either of those.

There’s nothing wrong with being created, nothing wrong with being happy or trying to be, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with living. It was that codification that made one crucial thing possible: And that is for ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things. Not the smartest, not the brightest, not the well born, not the richest. Ordinary. This is a nation that became the greatest nation in human history — in however many hundreds of thousands, billions, whatever years you want to say we’ve been plodding the earth — because of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things, made possible by the fact that our country was founded acknowledging that our freedom comes from God.

Not from a government and not from some other man or some other woman. It does not come from a demagogue. It does not come from somebody promising to take care of us. It inspired people to produce, to take care of themselves and anybody else that needed it in their community via their church or whatever neighborhood organization they happened to belong to. That’s what’s been lost. Too many people think that without government doing the right things, we can’t succeed — and the government, when run by people like are running it now, get in the way and make it impossible for ordinary people to do anything extraordinary.