Parenting & Family Quote by Kevin Eubanks

Kevin Eubanks isn’t talking like a policy wonk here; he’s talking like a working artist who’s watched a generation get shortchanged in real time. “Shameful” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s not disappointment, it’s moral indictment. He frames the problem as an active choice - “what we deny our children” - which quietly rejects the comforting story that systems just “fail” on their own. Someone is withholding. Someone is deciding.

The line also weaponizes the collective “we.” It’s inclusive enough to implicate the public, not just politicians, but slippery enough to invite listeners to agree without immediately asking what they personally owe. That’s a savvy rhetorical move for a musician speaking in a civic register: he can spark consensus before the debate splinters into budgets, school boards, and culture-war minutiae.

Eubanks’s context matters. As a prominent jazz guitarist and longtime bandleader, he comes from a tradition where American excellence is inseparable from public investment: music programs, mentors, instruments, rehearsal rooms, and the slow, expensive cultivation of talent. When he says “in this country,” he’s leaning on a national self-image that brags about opportunity while routinely cutting the ladders that make opportunity real. The subtext is especially pointed for the arts: we celebrate creative genius, then defund the conditions that produce it.

The sentence stays deliberately nonspecific, which is both its power and its warning. It can apply to education, healthcare, nutrition, safety, libraries, housing - the whole ecosystem of childhood. The vagueness isn’t evasive; it’s an invitation to recognize a pattern of neglect as a moral failure, not a partisan talking point.