The Obama progeny are well into their studies at Sidwell Friends School. As their parents, Barack and Michelle have every right to enroll their daughters in the school they think best for their children. Ironically, this is one of the many prerogatives the President’s most enthusiastic supporters would frown upon should you, the average American, decide to exercise them.
For decades now, liberals and secularists have argued that those pursuing nonpublic education for their children ought to be held in suspicion for exhibiting insufficient devotion to the COMMUNITY. Some might try to obfuscate the matter by claiming that that they do not oppose private education as much as they support the public alternatives.
This might be the line propagated for mass consumption, but the leftist opposition to private education (at least when it comes to your children) goes much deeper. For among the elites that think it is their place to mold what those below them believe and even how we live our lives, education is not so much about the accumulation of a particular body of knowledge or set of skills enabling the individual to make a way for themselves and their families in the world.
Rather, among this class education is seen about conditioning the vast majority into accepting the place predetermined for them and in such a way that they will not be able to advance beyond that. That is of course if human ambition is not engineered out of the individual human psyche all together through a combination of compulsory pharmaceuticals and a form of behavioral reinforcement popularly referred to as brainwashing.
Others will respond that, as the children of the President, these youngsters need to be protected from the assorted dangers that could befall them in a public school where access is gained more quickly than in a more disciplined private one. Such an assessment is absolutely correct.
However, the question to ask here happens to be are not your children as precious to you as the President’s are to him and are your children not entitled to the best kind of protection that you are capable of providing for them? Yet many of the very same elites applauding the Obamas’ decision to educate their children in a private school are among the very same voices insisting you are under some kind of obligation to the COMMUNITY to expose your offspring to an array of moral deviances and outright criminals.
As central as the issue of education is as the philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next, it is not the only matter the concerned citizen needs to be worried about in the dawning "progressivist" era. These social engineers hope to impose upon you a lifestyle below which you have grown accustomed and are perfectly capable of providing for yourself. Once again, this point is proven by comparing what Barack Obama has said to what he has actually done.
In a statement lamenting the environmental attitudes of the average American, Barack Obama has decreed that the world is nearing a time when we can no longer eat what we want, drive around in our SUV's, and keep our homes at 70 degrees. Of course, such hand-wringing and soul-searching agony is exhibited over how you, average American, live your life and has nothing whatsoever to do with this figure heralded as transformational lives his life. After all, as Hegel hypothesized, such figures are beyond the rules imposed upon the rest of us.
In the eyes of his Barackness, you probably eat too much and at a level higher than your social class ought to be permitted. However, our liege should be permitted to stuff his face as he sees fit. For while you are to subsist on berries and twigs not much more advanced than our gatherer ancestors of pre-agricultural times, at his inaugural lunch, Obama feasted upon seafood stew with lobster, duck, pheasant, molasses-whipped sweet potatoes, and apple sponge cake. There were also three wines to choose from (no wonder an old drunk like Ted Kennedy went into convulsions and had to be carted out in an ambulance).
Those inclined to give their new lord the benefit of the doubt will reply, “Well, why shouldn’t he have a special treat on his special day?” And who can argue with that as most (at least until Mayor Bloomberg has his way) get graduation and wedding cakes.
However, does someone that complains you are eating something other than sawdust and dirt have the right to turn around and like a king day in and day out?
Most Americans either prepare their own sustenance or are blessed to have someone in their family do this for them. Yet despite admonishing the rest of us repeatedly on the need for sacrifice, Barack is not going to settle for having someone in his family prepare his meals for him even though neither Michelle nor his mother-in-law living with the family at the White House have any other obligations to fulfill other than those of wife and grandmother.
Instead, the White House has at its disposal a first rate kitchen. Some may argue that such is necessary for assorted state dinners and diplomatic receptions as the facility can serve 140 guests.
However, according to a 1/28/09 Yahoo News story titled “Hail To The Chefs”, the one chef already employed by the White House is not enough. The Obama’s are bringing from Chicago their private chef (in other words, they have been of the mind for quite awhile now that they are too good to cook for themselves). And like his massa, the Obama chef thinks the average American suffers from “overabundance” and that those in the culinary professions “should take leadership in tackling public health issues”. As what, the beat cops of the food police?
Obama’s detached elitism goes beyond enjoying a level of snobbish luxury he would wish to keep from you to that of actually endangering lives and public safety. This was especially evident during the winter months when citizens could see first hand the implications of his flippant policy announcements. It is in this analysis that we see first hand that Obama does not really think or care all that much about regular Americans.
In his campaign oration, Obama lamented about Americans keeping their homes heated at around 70 degrees. The President is as much a hypocrite on this point as he is about shaming you on the matter of food while he stuffs his face with delicacies the rest of us can barely pronounce and even less likely ever taste.
For while you are suppose to sit around your home shivering all in the name of the environment and over what the ghetto nations of the earth think of the United States of America, Obama might be sweating, but its not over what he thinks the thermostat should be set to but because of what he has set the thermostat to. From photographs taken during Obama’s first full day in office, some where shocked when the President was caught without a suit coat on in the Oval Office.
Though this fell far short of the shock value of what Bill Clinton removed while within the confines of these particular walls, once again as a historical figure of Hegelian proportions, Obama is not bound by the strictures of the epoch he is leading us out of. According to his staff, Obama likes the thermostat set at 80 degrees since he is use to the warm weather of his native Hawaii.
Well whoopteedoo!!! If his majesty likes Hawaii so much, perhaps he should have run for governor of that state in order to run it into the ground rather than for the presidency of the United States.
However, while Obama basks in the sauna, you are suppose to suck it up and head out into the freezing cold. His highness insinuated as such when he enunciated his displeasure that his daughters’ school had cancelled classes after a spate of wintery precipitation.
Of this disruption to the scholastic calendar Obama ruminated, “My children’s school was cancelled today. Because of what? Some ice?...As my children pointed out, in Chicago, school is never cancelled...I’m saying, when it comes to weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things.”
Well, hurray for Chicago. If he likes the way things are done there, perhaps he should have stayed there with his crooked gangland associates.
Though the Obamas’ reputations as parents seem to be impeccable and loving, one must seriously question how often Barack has actually personally himself driven his daughters to school these past few years. After all, from the looks of it, daddy was either on the road campaigning or in Washington (at least that is where he should have been instead of out campaigning) as a member of the Senate.
And now with their father as President, it is doubtful that the Obama daughters will be subjected to the dangers of Washington area traffic. In all likelihood, each school day the New Lord's progeny will be motorcaded to their destination with all other vehicles required to get out of the way as they pass by.
Your children, one can conclude from the President's own words, aren't worthy of being escorted to school in a similar degree of safety. For if Americans are to give up their SUV's as admonished by the President, how are they suppose to get to school in one of those effeminate, limp-wristed hybrids?
No wonder the Obama whelps want to go to school in the slop. They don't have to worry about slipping on the ice.
One of the marks of a great leader is the willingness to abide by the same expectations they extol upon others. Despite all the hype about Obama being such a great leader that will turn back the rising seas and all that malarkey, it seems he can’t even rise to the level of the simplest expectation.
Frederick Meekins is an independent theologian and social critic. Frederick holds a BS in Political Science/History, a MA in Apologetics/Christian Philosophy from Trinity Theological Seminary, and a PhD. in Christian Apologetics from Newburgh Theological Seminary.
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