Glenn has talked a lot on his radio show the past few days about the idea of the "forgotten man" - the everyday American who has been left out of the political process so that progressives can satisfy their bases. It's the person who has money taken out of their paychecks that go towards programs and policies that keep the Harry Reids, Nancy Pelosis, and John McCains of the world in office. It's the millions of Americans who just want to be decent to one another, to use common sense, and stay out of the games being played in Washington. Over the weekend, one listener wrote into the show to express their frustration at being a "forgotten man".
Dear Glenn,I heard you talk about the forgotten man last week. You were talking about me. You were talking about us. I'm the farmer in Iowa, I'm a school bus driver in Tennessee, I'm a travelling salesman in Texas, I'm not rich I'm not poor. I'm not from the East Coast or the West Coast. I was not at the top of my class and I didn't occupy the bottom spot. I live, work, and raise my family somewhere in between. And that is why I am the forgotten man. Some call me middle class. Some think I’m average. Most think I'm ordinary. I'm none of these. Is the man who spends 14 hours a day in the field to help feed your family ordinary? Is the school bus driver who knows every kid by name and who also works on weekend to help feed her family, is she average? Is the salesman that drives from Dallas to Amarillo and ask his client, Mary, about her son who has been in the hospital so many times and gives her a had you gone as tears stream down her cheeks. Is he ordinary? Is he average? No, we are not average or ordinary and we don't just occupy the middle. We're so much more than that. And we are forgotten. And some say the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. Where I live, we don't measure people by what they have or don't have. We don't measure them by what they say. We measure people by what they do, by how they treat their neighbor and by the most important possession they have, we find out what's in their heart.
We do pay attention to what is and mostly what isn't happening in Washington, D.C. these days and in New York and in Hollywood and we chuckle because we know the answers to our nation's problems won't come from Pennsylvania Avenue or Wall Street or from Hollywood and Vine. The answers are already right here. The answers are on main street on maple street on route 14 or farm to market 141. But nobody big important, I guess, ever drives those roads. Just those of us who are forgotten.
Before I wrote to you, I did a little research. The New York Times has a daily subscription for both paper and digital editions of 1.8 million subscribers and on Sunday it’s 2.3 million. My math tells me that's an average of 2 million readers. Has anybody ever wondered what the other 328 million Americans are thinking about? I guess not.
I'm the forgotten man.
"The media...they heralded, heralded Occupy Wall Street. 'These are just good people, so fed up with the system that they just went and raped in the parks, crapped in the parks'. But the media is not really taking the side of our veterans, are they?" Glenn asked.
"The veterans who just reached a boiling point yesterday and said, ‘I'm not going to take it. This World War II monument we built with our money, it was not taxpayer money. It's not maintained by the federal government. It's ours.’ And they gently took the barricades down and stacked them up. Didn't throw them over fences, didn't do anything. Just took them and stacked them up and put them to the White House with a note, return to sender. Nobody is willing to -- Nobody is willing to -- nobody is willing to go out and say, look at what these guys did. You know why? Because the forgotten man, the man in the middle, the average person, they agree with the vets. They know who they are because they are the forgotten man.