As a tutor and mentor at Valley Oaks Elementary School in Houston for over 10 years, Kenny Thompson has taken pride in helping out kids. So on Monday, when he found out that over 60 students at his school were eating cold sandwiches for lunch because of overdue funds on their accounts, he decided to pay off the negative balance. All $465 of it.
“It was the best money I ever spent,” Thompson, 52, told TODAY.com. “It was the best gift I ever gave myself. I went into my car and screamed.”
He didn’t realize how widespread the lunch account problem was until he learned that a Utah school had thrown away the lunches of students with negative balances at the end of January. That’s when he decided to look into the issue in his own community.
He found out that some students whose parents hadn’t paid were eating cold cheese or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, instead of hot, hearty fare. And others avoided the lunch line altogether, preferring not to eat rather than face the embarrassment of not being able to afford the same lunch in front of their peers. Many of these students were already on reduced lunch, which costs just 40 cents a day.
“It was horrifying, it broke my heart,” he said. “These are elementary kids. They’re not bankers, and not responsible for the financial issues in the household.”
His wife, a teacher at Valley Oaks, encouraged him to follow through on the idea, but warned him that he wouldn’t be able to buy the new pair of Doc Martens he’d wanted. That was quite all right with Thompson.
“My work boots are still good,” he said with a chuckle.
People are wonderful sometimes
Anne Frank was right. “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
But how sad that these kids must depend on the Kenny Thompsons of the world, of which there are too few…
No, it’s not great. It’s a great headline, a great feel good story. But it allows skinflint tax cheat shitheads to get all warm inside and rub their own nipples every time they put a whole quarter into a pan handler’s paper cup. It allows people to get the idea in their head that charities can do what the government should be doing, but the cuts in the food stamp program over the past six months is as much as food charity programs provide IN TOTAL. Let’s see the motherfuckers at the Today Show do a segment on that. The problem is systemic, it’s widespread, it’s easily solved, but our disgraceful society of hostility allows a bullshit Today Show propaganda story like this to paper up the sucking chest wound that is poverty and hunger in America. And Al Roker complains that the snow in his neighborhood isn’t being cleared soon enough to suit his sense of superiority over people who live in the Rockaways. Of all the fucking gall . . . .
Progressives can walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s possible to applaud the generous impulses of people, and also do the hard work of organizing systemic change around those impulses. It won’t happen without everyone’s help.
Have to agree with Jay here. It’s not “progressives” I would be worried about. It’s how the entitled 1% uses stories like this one to rationalize their social Darwinist agenda, and how the general public will lap up the warm fuzzy side presented by the MSM, and ignore the systemic implications that Jay describes, but which the MSM won’t touch.
Another kind of exceptionalism.
Jay and Adams are right. And so is Susie. Progressives can walk and chew gum at the same time. The problem is that there are very few Progressive politicians. There are plenty of Progressives doing good things each and every day ‘outside’ the political system. But the 1% makes damn sure that Progressives never get their hands on the levers of power.
I don’t get these school lunch programs. I went to public schools in a middle class area that was trending to affluent during the 70s. Few kids ate the cafeteria lunches (there were no subsidies that I was aware of), and they were considered pretty nasty anyway, except sometimes on pizza Fridays (bad pizza is still pizza, I guess, but I never tried it). But most of us brownbagged or lunchboxed pb&j, or a slice of american “cheese food” with mayo, or a thin slice of bologna with mayo or mustard, on white bread every single school day. Maybe an apple or orange if the mom was health conscious (which often got thrown away) or chips and one or two cookies. And you got a nickel to buy milk at the cafeteria. It was pretty boring, and seems even worse in retrospect (and hard to imagine surviving on so few calories), but I don’t remember anybody feeling ashamed or embarrassed or deprived.
When did that change?