Understanding Rush
Thursday, November 2, 2006 2:03 PM PST
Roy Hicks | The Country Curmudgeon
I've always thought I understood Rush Limbaugh. As an arch-conservative myself, I was delighted to discover Rush on the radio 16 years ago and thought “Wow - here's a guy who really speaks for me!” This seemed incredible in a day when the mainstream media was a quagmire of liberal propaganda. In those days Rush was almost alone as a spokesman for the traditional values that made our country great.
Rush is the grandson of a Missouri lawyer and the son of a World War II fighter pilot: A quintessential midwestern boy who grew up in the same part of country I come from. He is 10 years younger, but shares the same deep and abiding respect for what Tom Brokaw once called “our greatest generation.” My father was a quiet family man who went off to war in 1943 and never returned. Men like my father and Rush's bought us a lifetime of peace and prosperity we can never repay except to honor them for what they did and try to preserve their values and standards.
As a new and powerful voice for the conservative right, Rush has always been a target for vicious attacks by the lunatic left. At first it was mere indignation how anyone could dare challenge the “moral superiority” of people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather: Cronkite, a befuddled old man who's lost touch with reality, and Rather, now exposed as an outright liar.
But a few years ago a curious scandal emerged. Rush, it was muttered darkly, was an addict turned onto jolly-drugs - the implication being he was a hypocrite using prescription medications for recreational purposes. It was further accused he'd gone “doctor-shopping” for medicos to provide him with such closely-controlled substances. Allow me to educate you, friends.
Rush explained at the time he was suffering from severe back pain. For anyone who has never experienced this, when your back hurts you hurt all over. I've been there myself, although luckily not very long at a time. I can't say how many of you may have experienced serious chronic pain, but I can speak from recent experience.
Exactly a month ago I started suffering from an inflamed nerve in my right shoulder which ached all the way down my arm. Put bluntly, it hurt like hell, and rest and home remedies like ice packs and heating pads hardly touched it. I even tried a chiropractor - something I'd never done before - but that didn't help either. By the fourth week I was hurting so much I'd have almost cut off my arm to stop the relentless angry pain, and had to seek emergency hospital diagnostics and drug intervention. This got me by until I could seek more conventional and extended therapy.
Now I understand Rush's former predicament a lot better than I ever did before. Believe me, when you're hurting that much you'll try anything to get out from under the constant grinding pain. It's still with me every day, and kindly don't try to give me any friendly advice like “just take it easy,” or “just tough it out.” I've done that many times before; but as I get older this gets harder to do, and if there's a shortcut to stopping the pain I'd damn well take it.
I'm not wealthy like Rush and I can't buy doctors to prescribe pain-killing drugs, but believe me I would do it if I could. It wouldn't be for fun or “recreational purposes” either ... it'd just be to get by from one day to the next.
