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Thursday, September 05, 2013

In which conservative hatred of bureaucracy and red tape is exposed as a sham

Raw Story - Fox News guest: 'That's a teaching moment' when hungry students don't get school lunches
Raw Story: A Fox News guest on Thursday argued that hungry students would have a “teaching moment” if they were refused access in the cafeteria line to school lunches because their parents hadn’t properly filled out the right paperwork.

During a segment on Fox & Friends, therapist and school counselor Thomas Kersting told host Gretchen Carlson that he approved of a New Jersey school district’s plan to reportedly “throw the meal away” if kids didn’t have enough money to pay for lunch.

“I agree with the superintendent,” he said. “I think it’s a little harsh. You know, I don’t think they’re going to throw the food out right in front of the kid and embarrass the kid.”

Kersting explained that some parents had allegedly told their children to accept the lunches before the paperwork had been completed and filed, and so the Willingboro School District had decided not to feed students unless their parents had signed the proper forms and been enrolled in the Free and Reduced Lunch program.
So no lunch for you until your mom has filled out the proper 27B/6. If we have children actually eating without the proper forms on file, why that’s a short step away from anarchy. It’s much more efficient to simply throw the lunch away, because… Well, never you mind about the because. Because central processing says so.

Kersting continued to explain how this was the smartest thing ever in the whole wide world. “We have more food than any other nation. You know, no kid is going to starve,” he went merrily on. “You know, if one day a kid doesn’t have lunch, right, maybe that’s a teaching moment when that kid doesn’t have lunch. That may sound harsh saying that, but we’ve got to get people to start being responsible for themselves.”

The fact that “we have more food than any other nation” is meaningless if we’re throwing away food, rather than letting people eat it. You wonder if this guy understands that eating isn’t some sort of pleasure reserved for the deserving, but is rather a necessity to, you know, live and stuff. And that “teaching moment” stuff? That’s the sort of “let them eat cake” shit that would’ve cost you your head in the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette here only thinks he’s making a compelling argument.

But really, conservatives are all about mindless, faceless bureaucracies these days. They’re making people jump through bureaucratic hoops to vote, to have access to an entirely legal abortion, and now to eat. When conservatives complain about bureaucrats, their really complaining that the privileged aren’t n some sort of express lane around all the bureaucratic BS they expect everyone else to navigate through like a rat in a maze trying to get to the cheese.

If a big banker needs a little government oversight, that’s freakin’ Big Government Run Amok. If a kid misses a meal because his mom didn’t sign the proper 27B/6, well that’s a teaching moment. Please observe as we dispose of the Sloppy Joe in the proper government approved receptacle, in the government approved manner.

Now let that be a lesson to you.

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