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Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren

Staying in school for your country



Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren earlier this week was generally well received. Whatever Obama’s initial intentions were, the politics had been edited out by the time the speech was delivered. No doubt Barack Obama wanted to use the speech to push his far left agenda on the kids, especially his plans for socialized healthcare.

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One comment that came across as strange was the president’s telling the nation’s youth that they should stay in school “for their country”. Does anyone really stay in school, spending long hours studying “for their country”? Not really. Most people who want and who are willing to work for an education do so for themselves, not their country. In the end if that education provides a beneficial good or service or helps the person create wealth the country is ultimately made better. But it is hard to believe that many people seek to become an astrophysicist or a doctor or a Wall Street tycoon in order to help their country. An easy inference to draw from Obama’s remarks is that he was simply being patriotic; a better education will make a great country greater. The problem with that is that Barack Obama is hardly a patriot. He doesn’t like his country very much. The United States is the country that is responsible for all the evil in the world and its capitalist base is responsible for all the inequity in the US. Barack Obama wants to change the United States from the most powerful country in the world to just another run of the mill socialist, totalitarian state. One of the few critics of Obama’s speech was Rush Limbaugh. Shortly after the speech was delivered, Limbaugh opined that the entire talk was about individual responsibility which is contrary to everything Barack Obama stands for. Obama doesn’t want people to take responsibility for themselves; he and his unelected czars want to control every aspect of Americans’ lives. Rush was wrong. There is nothing inconsistent in Obama stressing that kids should take responsibility for their education and individual responsibility does play a part in a socialist or totalitarian state. Look at the former Soviet Union for example. The Soviets wanted to enter and win the space race and in order to at least have a chance to succeed the USSR needed top rocket scientists and other highly skilled workers. Sure, they could force young people with an aptitude for such study to take relevant courses even though that student would have preferred to study or work in another field. They could even have placed police in the schools to point guns at the students’ heads to ensure that they remained there. But the state could not force these young people to gain enough skill to accomplish the objectives of the state in winning the battle for outer space. The students themselves had to take individual responsibility to learn enough to accomplish the tasks that they were scheduled to later undertake. Of course this individual responsibility did nothing for the students themselves; they would reap little if any reward for their efforts but they would achieve the objectives of the state. In other words, they really did stay in school “for their country”. Which was exactly what Barack Obama told American students to do. Of course when Barack Obama said that students should stay in school for their country he didn’t mean the country that the United States now is; he meant the United States that he is working hard to achieve. But even his vision of a socialist utopia will necessarily rely on people undertaking personal responsibility to achieve the state’s objectives.


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Arthur Weinreb -- Bio and Archives

Arthur Weinreb is an author, columnist and Associate Editor of Canada Free Press. Arthur’s latest book, Ford Nation: Why hundreds of thousands of Torontonians supported their conservative crack-smoking mayor is available at Amazon. Racism and the Death of Trayvon Martin is also available at Smashwords. His work has appeared on Newsmax.com,  Drudge Report, Foxnews.com.

Older articles (2007) by Arthur Weinreb


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