The media has jumped in headfirst with stories about a nation being on the verge of kids dying of starvation in school hallways. It’s clear that the left has targeted “hunger” as a major platform from which to launch collective programs that destroy individual initiative and promote government dependency.
Durham schools, for instance, are lousy with do-gooders who simply refuse to let kids and their families subsist on their own. Guilty white liberals constantly write on their white-neighborhood list servs about weekend food backpack programs to keep kids from starving over the weekend, urban gardens, school gardens and free lunches. They see hunger and starvation everywhere.
So do the media. USAToday makes this squishy claim:
Although the number of hungry children in the U.S. is rising, fewer than half of the kids who could be eating a free or low-cost breakfast at school are getting one.
A nearly hysterical lunch lady in Oregon said this:
“When the kids came back from spring break, they were starving,” Shelly Drury says. “They wanted seconds, they wanted thirds. My principal was saying, ‘We need to cook more food.’ “
One wonders how kids survived before there were public schools.
I’ve written a couple of times recently about efforts by elected officials to coax young kids into the free-lunch programs at their schools. I called it “dependency crack,” which upset some readers, a couple of whom said I was a racist for referring to crack. My critics, I should point out, are the ones who immediately thought “black people” when they saw the word, so who’s the racist?
Thomas Sowell’s column today, “The hunger ‘hoax’ perpetuates dependency,” echos my earlier posts:
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over “hunger in America.”
Dan Rather opened a “CBS Evening News” broadcast in 1991 declaring, “One in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.
When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.
That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Sen. John Edwards was running for vice president. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.
Hunger is a political cudgel used periodically to salve the guilt of those who feel they are too “fortunate,” or to bash those who think people who can take care of themselves ought to do so. The media and liberal office holders, of course, are willing conduits for the hunger hoax in America.
