The only segment of the MSNBC network I can stomach is the half hour or so of Morning Joe I watch on the treadmill every morning, during which we are treated to periodic commercials for the network featuring its various personalities touting the institutional motto “Lean Forward”, which I assume is a proxy for progressivism. Most are fairly predictable and mundane, but then there is the one by Melissa Harris-Perry on children and education, in which she says this:
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s , then we start making better investments.”
Wow. You really cannot make up this stuff. Where to start? This is a throwback to the “general will” of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in which the collective will trumps individual rights in the interest of the common good as defined by the vanguard elite, a precursor to the various manifestations of totalitarianism since the French Revolution. In other words, our children belong to the state. Nothing could be further from our founding principles. I would like to think that Joe Scarborough is duly embarrassed.
