Damage Control Mode for North Carolina Lunch Fiasco - Revised

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nc-school-teachers-mistake-at-school-lunch-led-to-upset-calls-of-government-overreach/2012/02/16/gIQAof8NIR_story.html?tid=pm_national_pop

Note that I have read various versions identifying the main actor in this case to be a teacher, state bureaucrat, and a federal bureaucrat. For simplicity I have just used teacher for this post.

Here it comes.....

Leftist bloggers and the mainstream media, itself a tool of the Left, are now in high gear as they try to paint a picture of the 4 year-old NC student lunch fiasco that falls way short of what it is.

Several blog posts and articles, including the one above, are generously and eagerly doing all that they can to spread the lie this this event was just some simple mistake, that the teacher "overreached", that maybe better training will help faculty members better understand state policy. Those engaged in damage control mode have, predictably, started in with the label of "conspiracy theorists" etc. when discussing those who dare comment on yet another example of government interference in the authority of a parent.

Guys, its not working any more than "wardrobe malfunction" worked. There, young men and women were told that it was OK to rip clothing off women as long as you later claim that it was an accident. Here the lie is that it is OK to tell a child that she is not allowed to eat her property, in this case her lunch, cheerfully write that act off as a mistake, and pretend to believe that you don't understand why people are so upset.

Notice how the Left piece-by-piece steps in to override parental authority. There game is a carefully planned one; keep taking slices of decision-making authority away from Mom and Dad until someone cries foul, then retreat from that single event and say "Oh, we are so sorry, that was a mistake". They may lose an inch, but they gained several yards in the long process prior to that one incident.

I needed to hold off commenting on this event until the inevitable 1984- style "newspeak" began and here it is. In George Orwell's novel about a totalitarian future, not only was a new language created that removed all possible abstract, creative, deep-thinking, or any other non-concrete verbal means to express thought, but the main character's job was to go back into the microfilm (remember those?) of the newspaper for which he worked, and edit previous comments by party bosses to reflect what they want the record to say as opposed to what actually was said or happened.

Going back to my 1981 memory (Yes, I read 1984 before 1984) an example of this was to retrieve an article on the party boss's predictions for a bountiful harvest (The harvest had turned out badly) and edit it to change what the boss said. This way the official record was that the boss actually said that the harvest wasn't going to be so great in the past year.

Rush Limbaugh, to my knowledge, was the first main commentator to see this for what it was - yet another way of the state stepping in and undermining the authority of a parent. They have already done all that they can to essentially tell students to engage in sexual activty, get abortions without their parents knowledge, and anything else from the grab bag of stripping away the fiber of this culture piece-by-piece. Now, a teacher steps in and, with his or her probably unwashed hands, picks through the contents of  a four year-old's  lunch and tells the poor confused kid that she is not allowed to eat the property that her mother gave to her and that she has to get in line to get a school meal.

The bold-faced lie that this was a mistake does not hold any water whatsoever. No teacher would have mistakenly done this. Teacher, you knew full well what you were doing. There is no possible way that a teacher would not have been able to figure out that the addition of a carton of milk would have rounded the lunch off to the states's satisfaction. No, this teacher, full of a sense of superiority induced from the statist Halls of Academia in the US, saw a means to assert the authority of the state into the innocent event of a kid's lunch. 

Please do not give this teacher too much credit by pretending that he or she was really that stupid.

I shudder at the utter lack of empathy for the poor kid. What child of that age has the intellectual ability to understand that he or she is in the presence of a very bad person when that same individual is going through the play-act or helping the student.


How dare you?

We are just so blessed in our nation that children can go about town, attend school, and pretty much go through their days with a really nice sense of security that the daily routine will go as usual and not have to look over their shoulders for some sort of threat. It is not like that in much of the world. Here, though, in the absence of any real problems that need to be solved, in the very place in which the concept of the orderly day is taught, a kid can't just pick up her lunch, sit down, and eat it. Can you imagine the confusion that this kid felt? The teacher has to look at my food and let me know if I can eat it?

Even if the lunch was not so great, though all accounts agree that it was fine, even that would not mean that the Mom did not provide a great breakfast and is planning a great dinner. Are we to decide that a parent, who may even have a picky-eating child and therefore splurges a bit on fun stuff to eat at lunch in school, does not have the authority to use a little discretion when choosing what gets packed into a lunch box?

Maybe a parent just wants to make sure that the child eats when at school and is therefore willing to be a little less rigid in food choices for that meal.

The state of North Carolina can make whatever rules, or regulations that have the force of law, that it wishes but these, as a matter of substantive due process, have no weight whatsoever when it comes to what a parent packs for his or her child. If  school staff begin to notice a pattern, not an isolated event, in which a child is coming to school unwashed, poorly-fed, etc, that is what administration/parent meetings are for. If the school prefers to stay out of this or if the meetings do not produce any measurable effect, then that is what a state Division of Youth and Family Services is for. (Or Child Services or any other name it may have in a particular state)

This is a case in which Civil Disobedience is essentially mandated. If this was going on in my kid's school, my plan would be to go to the office and remain there until I am assured that my child's lunch will not be picked through. That's all I want. Even if this act risked a defiant trespasser-type charge it would have to be done.

The nuclear family has been under attack for a very long time. Current 21 year-old adults were raised on kid's shows that did nothing other than to constantly portray parents as bumbling idiots versus the teenagers or young kids who had it all together. At the risk of having the racist or Nazi epithet hurled at me, I will still call this for what it is - we are in the middle of a kulturkampf. The very sense of our identity is what is at stake. This applies to all racial and religious groups that have been part of, and/or contributed to, the growth the US and the remainder of the West. All of our beliefs, practices, and ethics have long been under attack. The problem has been that the bad guys have been fighting and we have been telling ourselves that no fight existed. We can no longer afford to delude ourselves. The bad guys have their game perfectly orchestrated; keep peeling away layers of things like parental authority, step back once in a blue moon when they get caught going too far, and then poke fun at and label as conspiracy mongers any rightfully concerned people.

As a last note: Although many in the US do have the gene mutation that allows for the digestion of lactose and therefore the ability to consume cow's milk, many do not. The gene is mostly found among those of Northern European extraction and has been associated by many with the loosely-related Indo-Europeans  who moved into Europe in several migrations of various size and scope starting in the Chalcolithic period. Although I digest milk quite well and consider it to be a great food source, I never understood why it has been determined to be a basic food group since an appreciable amount of people do not have the ability to properly digest it. I guess that the dairy industry has a lot of pull.

Again, we are asked to believe that a teacher was really so stupid as to assume that all kids should drink milk without at least checking first. Remember that the spin put on this by the Left was that the lack of milk in the lunch was the sole reason for the denial of permission for the child to eat her lunch.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/n-c-food-inspector-sends-girls-lunch-home-after-determining-its-not-healthy-enough/