Ask what your country will force you to do
Bookworm on Jul 31 2008 at 7:51 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama
IBD has another superb editorial, this one about Obama’s plan to force young people to work in the new age Greenie trenches of his socialist imagination:
Obama says that as president he will “set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year.” What he doesn’t say is that he’ll make such voluntarism compulsory by attaching strings to federal education dollars. The schools will make the kids volunteer. It’s called plausible deniability.
In a commencement speech at Wesleyan University, Obama advised graduates not to pursue the American dream of success, but to serve others.
“You can take your diploma, walk off this stage and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should,” he told the graduates. “But I hope you don’t.”
Don’t be another Bill Gates and amass a fortune making people more productive and successful in their daily lives and giving your countrymen a standard of living the world will envy. Exchange your cap and gown for sackcloth and ashes. Leave your possessions behind and come and follow Obama.
“Fulfilling your immediate wants and needs betrays a poverty of ambition,” he opined. Shame on us for being selfish and buying that SUV built by an autoworker trying to fulfill his family’s immediate wants and needs.
“Our collective service can shape the destiny of this generation,” Obama said. “Individual salvation depends on collective salvation.”
We already have a Salvation Army that is truly a volunteer organization. Collective service and salvation is not a classic definition of voluntarism. What Obama has in mind is to turn America into a socialist version of the old Soviet collectives.
And if your idea of service is to join the military and keep others alive and free, forget about it. And never mind about ROTC on campus.
Obama has no place for those who are willing to abandon fame and fortune to lay down their lives for their friends and ours. “At a time of war,” Obama says, “we need you to work for peace.”
With President Obama in the White House, you’ll still be free — as long as your idea of freedom coincides with Obama’s demands on your time, intelligence, and efforts.
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8 Responses to “Ask what your country will force you to do”
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Instead of pursuing money, you could enter “public service” and–like Charlie Rangel and many others–get people to give you special favors.
The Soviet ruling class, of course, perfected this principal–with very modest salaries, they lived lives of luxury.
This is what comes of allowing Socialists to take over American schools for more than a century. I loathe Obama. Utterly loathe the creature.
As these Communist policies are rolled out by Vladimir Ilich Obama,
more and more of the regular voters will switch to McCain.
Al
This goes way beyond Obama. I think we must challenge the whole assertion of the political and “policy” classes that what they do–what they define as “public service”–is inherently morally superior to what other Americans do.
Is the pursuit of power inherently nobler than the pursuit of money? (Note that power also generally yields money, or money-equivalents, in the mode of Rangel or even of Ted Stevens)
Is the government worker who writes about agricultural policy morally superior to the farmer who actually grows food?
Is the “nonprofit” analyst who writes about transportation policy morally superior to the railroad executive who deals with the practicalities every day?
Is the environmentalist morally superior to the entrepreneur who puts his own money at risk in new energy technologies?
How does that man excuse his wife’s job and astronomical salary at the University of Chicago Hospital?
So the Obamas can have a pretty big house in Chicago, nice suits, and no apparent need to do much volunteering but we are supposed to?
I don’t know - the only image I have in my head when I hear this is Michelle Obama saying several months ago in a speech that “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism.”
All of this just gives me the willies.
Deana
All of you are hitting the nail on the head. I especially agree with David’s and Deana’s take, one about the freedom to choose what’s beneficial, and the other about the hypocrisy that characterizes the Obamas. I’ve said it before and, after reading all these comments, I’ll say it again: I have smart blog friends.
And this is exactly why they don’t want the military on their schools and indoctrination camps.
They don’t want any kind of competing philosophy that could prove their teachings to be unwise or megalomaniacal.
It is easy to believe a fake thing to be the genuine article, when you haven’t seen the real thing. By keeping liberty, free speech, and self-sacrifice, in the form of the military, from polluting the minds of the young, they are able to demonstrate that their philosophy and armed groups are superior.
Here’s a doozey, and I haven’t seen anything reported on it.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=69601
I remember reading it at the time and thought WHAT? I suppose the statement is so absurd, the MSM has just ignored it, but the implications, if Obama is serious, are mindboggling.