School Meal Program Causes Imbalance In Delicate Family Ecology
By Frederick Meekins (07/19/06)
From ecology, it has been learned that a complex interplay of factors and forces results in the balance of nature that environmentalists insist can be easily thrown out of whack should any one of these readings stray too far from the optimal norms. As the pinnacle of the food chain, a number of these principles apply to human beings and their societies as well.
For example, one of the strongest human desires is to copulate and produce children. These urges are kept in check by the responsibility of having to provide for and take care of the offspring that could potentially result from the physical intermingling of man and woman preferably in the context of binding matrimony.
As such, most rational people discipline themselves to have no more children than they are capable of taking care of. However, Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams wants to upset the delicate balance by instituting a program where government school students in the city could receive three meals per day at government expense.
Supporters say the program would “take a big step towards ending child hunger.” However, such a proposal hardly has the best interests of children at heart.
For by taking over the task of procuring and distributing the nutritional allotments of some 20,000 children, the government is unhinging from parenthood one of the fundamental reasons for this most important of human undertakings, namely providing for the kids you yourself had the fun of making.
Very few are going to have the courage to admit it, but often the families enrolled in these assistance programs are rarely ever headed by model parents. Now being freed almost entirely of the burden of expending their energies tending to the progeny they do have, by no longer having to provide three meals a day, what is to prevent parents tottering along the edge of delinquency and neglect from either spending the money freed up by not having to pick up most of the family food tab during the week on luxuries they don’t deserve such as plasma screen TV’s and nose piercings or to revel in additional promiscuity resulting in additional babies they have no intentions of raising properly?
Those wracked by the sex fever gripping our society will invoke their favorite refrain that it’s nobody’s business how those on public assistance conduct their lives. Maybe so if these people had kept their business to themselves and not come forward to suckle off the public teat with the same lack of discretion they exhibited in bedding multiple partners. But once these people come forward and admit they are unable to effectively run their own lives by demanding assorted forms of assistance despite not suffering from a crippling disability, the matter becomes the business of all taxpayers.
Another fundamental question few have the courage to ask in this overly communitarian age is why do the rest of us have to pay for other people’s kids to eat? Frankly, are these kids even starving?
Though the American people have been duped into believing these meals are all that stand between the youngsters that receive them and malnutrition, that is not necessarily the case. For you see, in DC, students are eligible for free breakfasts irrespective of income.
Theoretically, citizens of modest means could end up financing the meals of the well-to-do such as members of Congress or successful interest group functionaries. Who’s to say the expanded program won’t invite all comers to dine at the government trough?
Neither is the program simply about the bare nutrition needed to survive. With low cost stores such as Wal-Mart, Aldi’s, Save-A-Lot, and even Dollar Tree there is no reason why any self-respecting parent can’t get some kind of food into their offsprings’ bellies.
They might not eat like kings and their parents might have to delay getting that tattoo or the gold teeth they wanted, but to put it bluntly, no where are these luxuries guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration for those unwilling to provide for themselves. If they can work their tails in bars and nightclubs, they can work their hands on the jobsite or in the office.
One of the most memorable lines ever uttered on the Simpsons (quite an accomplishment on this television classic with so many memorable moments) was set in the future when Lisa Simpson is President. Milhaus as presidential advisor says to her that the only thing school lunches and midnight basketball got us was a generation of supercriminals that didn’t requite sleep.
In many ways, the human economy is as delicate and as beautiful as the natural environment. And like it, should any one of the components be unduly stimulated, the whole system faces the possibility of collapse with civilized man becoming yet another endangered species.
By Frederick Meekins
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