When has America ever been okay? It went from land of the free while enslaving people and restricting voting ability, to then freeing slaves but continuing to oppress entire groups to minimize their allowable impact on society, until they it became oppress people financially every way possible.
They absolutely do not. There is a big difference before junior high and post high school. Humans do need to learn and children are running on instinct and feelings until they do. Its a process and takes more time for some than others. Some never learn.,
In elementary school in the early 80s I was called poor (which I was) because I had to bring a box lunch in an old beat up lunchbox my mom got from a yard sale for a nickel, and could not afford cafeteria lunches. All my food was home made and the kids made fun of everything I brought. It got so bad I used to get in trouble all the time so I always had lunch detention and had to eat with my teacher.
yeah. we had a big family and there was competition for normal looking brown bags which I was not good at so mine was in the wonder bread bag. I would not say we were poor. We were poor for the rich suburb we lived in but it was a big working class family and my parents, rightly, prioritized getting a house, even the worst house, in a good school district and getting it paid off.
Yes. The near-by town (8 miles away) got a flashing traffic light when I think I was in 4th grade. Then the next town had 3 stop lights. The city was 90 miles away.
It boggles my mind to think about no indoor plumbing in the US at that time. Should not be so surprised. When my wifes granma passed away she lived like single digits from chicago in a multiflat. The back still had these areas in the garage for cows. Blew my mind. Granted the area she was in was close to the old stockyards.
In England we had it with school jumpers, poor kids had a cheap jumper with the logo sewn on, everyone else had an official jumper.
I was one of the three or so “poor” kids in my year, and it was quite embarrassing. Wasn’t even poor, my mum was just extremely stingy and wouldn’t pay for the proper jumper…
I think the saddest part is that most of the people pushing these awful ideas did not get theirs. And instead of trying to do something constructive to help themselves and others, they are desperately fighting to make sure that no one else “gets theirs” either.
I remember in grade school my district had a system where everyone who bought anything at the cafeteria went through an internal “type in your ID to the pin pad” system. Internally, the computer would decide whether the student was charged against their account or if it did a discount/free. This was how they dealt with that.
And it’s entirely preventable. We can afford to feed every single student every single day. It doesn’t have to be a brown bag, sad little whitebread and cheese slice sandwich. It can be the same food everyone else eats. In fact, we spend more administering a for-profit food service payment system than we spend on the food. It would be cheaper to just give it away to everyone.
We know this because we did it during COVID. All of the schools closed, and the for-profit food providers were going to lose a lot of money. Sysco and Aramark and US Foods and Sodexo are all big donors to both parties, so we had to bail them out by buying the food. There wasn’t a debate in congress, there wasn’t any tax increase or funding shortfall. The money was just there because they wanted it.
Schools had more food than they knew what to do with. Food banks and public pantries were fully stocked, and school districts were begging parents to come take home some breakfasts and lunches.
It could really just be like that. No registers, no accounting, no shaming poor kids, no threatening demand letters, no lunch cards, no websites. Just feed children, because hungry children don’t learn.
During Covid, the money just went straight to the corporations, and the food went to the schools. With schools back in session, the Conservatives in the federal government put restrictions on the funding, requiring documentstion and forms for all of the students participating in the program. They wanted to make it as onerous and invasive as possible. This administrative red tape disproportionately affected the more densely populated regions, and also gave the conservative states a reason to decline participation. Because if Republicans are going to be forced to help children, by God they’re going to use the statistics against their enemies.
The part with the teacher who was tasked with telling all of the students that free lunches are over… Jesus Christ. She could see the worried faces and darting eyes of the kids who were depending on those meals.
I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but this never happened when I was in middle school and high school in the 90s. If someone couldn’t afford the school lunch they had a free lunch program where kids would just go up to the counter and get a sandwich and a juice. No one ever said anything to the kids who got the free lunch because it’s lunch lol everyone’s gotta eat!
Making someone wear a wristband because they couldn’t afford lunch just seems needlessly cruel
Tbf, cruelty isn’t the point. For the recipients of the most benefits of conservatives being in charge, things like lower taxes and free handouts to corporations etc. is the point. And to Russia and China, the point of the disinformation warfare is to distract while invading others countries. And to the voters themselves, they get to live in a fantasy dreamland where “God is in charge” (ignoring all those pesky parts of the Bible that say e.g. take care of widows & orphans, the worker deserves their wages, you reap what you sow, etc.).
All the school shootings, all the lunch shamings, all of it, and it’s all a by-product of those real goals. Children’s actual lives, health , and mental health do not seem to matter in the slightest according to those precepts. 😭
Yeah the wristband is some bullshit. When I was a kid and on the free lunch for poor kids program, all they needed was a fucking list at the checkout. I took my lunch tray to the checkout lunch-lady and said my name, and she’d check it on the list and we were done.
A “Scarlet P” as it were isn’t defensible, but a name-only system seems ripe for abuse. Unless the employee can keep track of every student, all it takes is a greedy and/or cruel student to use someone else’s name and they don’t get a lunch that day.
Best method, imo, is free lunch for every student. No fuss, no muss. That children are held responsible for the economic welfare of their family (and there are people fighting to keep it that way) is atrocious. Just feed the children, easy as.
The elementary school I taught at offered free lunches to all students. Still, parents who packed food for their kids would give them Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Takis and a huge can of Arizona Ice Tea daily. These students looked down on hot lunch kids. I remember seeing a student that had a lunchable everyday, but clearly their parent got it from a 7/11 or something because there was a price tag on it and it was for $5. There were also parents that dropped of fast food EVERY SINGLE DAY to their student. These were low income families too.
When lunch food is a status symbol, the system has failed you.
Why do people keep asking if we’re okay? No, we are clearly not completely fine. We’re neck-deep in an information war and who will be the ultimate victor is very much undecided.
Frankly, we probably would’ve activated NATO’s Article 5 provision by now, except what good would it do when all of our allies are already under the same sort of attack?
Seriously though, people do not call for civil war in countries that are doing completely fine. That is not a sign of robust civic health.