Hekate
Hekate's JournalThat's very Libertarian of you. You think schools should have libraries & science labs...
...if the parents can't pony up? Or maybe only those kids who pay a special fee can use them? Sidewalks on streets? Electricity in the Tennessee Valley?
Did you know that the original school lunch program came about as a national security issue? When it came time to draft young men for the Army in WWII, an uncommonly large number were rejected due to nutritional diseases that never should have happened? It was particularly bad in the South.
Rickets
Pellagra
Scurvy
Xerophthalmia
Beriberi
Goiter
Anemia
In extreme enough forms, most of these things kill the sufferer. In less extreme cases they merely cause a lifetime of skeletal deformity, blindness, and low IQ.
Not seen much in 1900, cases burgeoned in the 1920s - 1930s, thus all the sick young men who failed their draft physicals in 1941. By the time I was growing up in the 1950s - 1960s, I learned about these nutritional diseases in public school textbooks and doctors hardly ever saw them.
To check my memory, I googled the information above, and here's a representative link:
http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/canres/35/11_Part_2/3246.full.pdf
Nutrition in the United States 1900-1974
Another thing I recall from my childhood is nutritious school lunches so cheap even my own penny-pinching mother couldn't make a sack lunch cheaper. (I found out later there were still some kids who fell through the cracks.) Hawai'i in those years was not a rich state and we were a blue-collar lower-middle class family. Yet every school had a cafeteria, a kitchen, a chill room and a walk in refrigerator. Every kid from 5th-12th grade was rostered a couple of days a year to help out in the kitchen. The jobs were not outsourced to a private company, and the enterprise was not supposed to make money, any more than the schools themselves were supposed to show a profit.
Wherever did the money come from? Well, SOMEbody thought this was a good use of our tax money, for starters. Also, and Christ on a trailer hitch you should know this, America throws away tons of produce. I suspect some of those big blocks of cheese were government surplus.
The nutritional diseases of today are different. Chldren have obesity, clogged arteries, and diabetes, instead of ricketts and scurvy. It would be nice if someone thought it was a priority.
But you carry on with your Libertarian philosophy. Hope you've paid up your dues to the for-profit fire department and all.
I used to be happy to call myself a "progressive," but to hell with that when Hitler.2 is potus...
I am a Democrat. I am a Liberal. I worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968. My political party is composed of fallible human beings, but gets more things right than wrong.
When I see the "Progressives" going the way of the Greens in terms of losing vitally important elections to the GOP, that's where I get off the crazy-train and go back to first principles: I am a Democrat. I am a Liberal.
Steve Schmidt (former R) is right: the Republican Party has gone rotten to its core and must be not just defeated but expunged.
This is a war, and Nancy Pelosi is one of our most valuable generals. When she says to her troops (the only ones she has, the House Dems) that if they have a problem they should come talk to her personally and not go tweeting all over the place like Trump, she is right. If the House cannot show public unity, we all lose, and lose bigly.
"Sells out to powerful interests" is an extremely loaded & prejudicial phrase...
Unfortunately, I expect to see it used on each of our candidates as they near frontrunner status, just as it has been used on Hillary Clinton and others of our best Democrats.
I just want to point out that it is a trolling term. It is a ratfcking term.
As a phrase it should have no place here. Emotions may run high, but we also have brains, and I hope we will use said brains to think critically about what we are passing along.
No, I have not read the article. The title said it all.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
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