Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

 

What is for Lunch?

In response to accusations made in dear-editor letters during my first term in office, I now openly admit I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Although Robin Leach never got around to filming the Double Rafter Ranch on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”, my adolescence was one of privilege—but for atypical reasons. Here was a normal winter school day when I was a kid.

After breakfast and brushing our teeth, my two brothers and I grabbed our lunch boxes and hustled to Slack School. It was a half-mile trek up the county road and unlike the stories of my ancestors; it was actually only uphill one way. During the winter time the gravel road was solid ice, so using our black, metal, lunch boxes like a puck, we played a game which was a blend of bowling and curling. With a smooth launch, it was possible to skid your lunch box 150 feet along the road before it slid off into the borrow pit. Before we knew it, we were at school where we placed our lunch boxes on the shelf, hung our coats on the peg and took our seats in the one-room country school.

In 1965, I was the third grade at Slack School. (No, I did not forget a word in that sentence. Depending on which direction you measured, I was the top or bottom student in my class for three years.) Sharing the room with me were first, second and sixth graders, while the fourth graders held class in the trailer house out back. At lunch time, which felt like eons since breakfast, we snagged our lunch boxes and scurried back to our desks. Unsnapping the two silver latches, opening the lunch box and inhaling the glorious aroma of sandwiches, cheese, chicken, apples, carrots, milk or a candy bar, made lunch time the highlight of my day. It was like Christmas morning, digging through all the goodies Mom placed in my lunch box and to this eight-year-old it felt as if Mom was sitting right there eating with me. My life was privileged because I grew up a country kid whose mom packed his lunch. Today, 47 years later, the importance of my grade school lunchbox has come back into focus.

A few weeks ago in North Carolina, an agent from the Division of Child Development and Early Education rejected the lunch of a four-year-old preschooler because it was nutritionally deemed outside government standards. The Food Police brought the lunch into compliance by adding three chicken nuggets and billing the irresponsible parent $1.25. Let me repeat this: This little girl was four years old.

Operating under the Department of Health and Human Services, this agent is probably one of the one-million jobs created or saved by President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This means there could be 999,999 others of a similar mindset lurking in lunch rooms across America. What has happened to my country? If there had been Food Police at Slack School in 1965 who deemed some aspect of my lunch as below government standards thereby reprimanding my mother—lookout. Mom, who carried the secrete nickname “Fang”, would have exploded in a manner glorified in country / western songs like Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It”. Do not misinterpret my mother’s reaction; she definitely was not the mother-hen type who hovered around school protecting her little ones, but she was fearless in labeling wrong as wrong. Back then, parents demanded the freedom to raise their children as they saw fit, but the ‘60s began the conditioning of parents to be meek and yield to the whims of an all-knowing big government.

Marxist philosophy did not break the American family overnight; it took decades to systematically disassemble the backbone of our great republic. First, fathers were removed from the family equation through aid programs rewarding illegitimacy. Next, government replaced God as our controlling moral authority and the little people were trained there is a government solution to every problem. If you need healthcare, turn to government. If you need help with your green energy bill, turn to government. If you want a house, but can’t afford a mortgage, turn to government. If you want a free college education, turn to government. If the earth feels too warm, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, too dark, too light…you get the picture. Americans have become too timid to make even the simplest decisions in life, such as preparing lunch for our children. Enslavement to big government will continue until the majority of us stand and scream, “Leave me alone. Leave my children alone. Leave my property alone. I just want to be free!” What say you?



 
 
 
 
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