odinsblog:Paul Ryan once argued that “liberal government programs give people comfort, but not digni

odinsblog:Paul Ryan once argued that “liberal government programs give people comfort, but not dignity.” And to justify cutting Welfare and defunding food programs, Republicans disingenuously equate having the basic necessities needed to live — like food — to dignity. Following that logic, are we to believe that wealthy people somehow have more dignity than poor people, because they have more access to more resources like housing, food and clean drinking water? Do the mostly white residents of Bismarck North Dakota have more dignity than the Native Americans at Standing Rock? Do Donald Trump’s children somehow have more “dignity” than does Little Miss Flint? Because Trump’s children don’t need to depend on free lunch programs? Wealth ≠ dignity. Access to resources ≠ dignity. People living in or born into poverty do not have less dignity. They have less wealth and less political power. Providing free school lunches to children living in poverty doesn’t “give kids an empty soul” it simply feeds hungry children. Feeding a hungry child lunch is not “giving them undue comfort” or making them lazy, it’s simply feeding a hungry child. How did feeding hungry children become a controversial act for “Christian” conservatives?Intentionally starving children to teach them the “dignity” of hunger is inhumane.Stop stigmatizing poverty. Stop equating poverty with a lack of dignity. Stop reinforcing the notion that poor people have no dignity just because they’re poor. There is no nobility in starvation, and there is no benevolence in allowing children or anyone else to go hungry when you possess the power to prevent it. The grossness of Ryan’s argument doesn’t end there, unfortunately. To reach his argument about “dignity” -because apparently the thought-preventing pain and lethargy of starvation are more dignified than having a full belly; one wonders why, if Ryan genuinely thinks this, he eats so well- he begins with an Argument about “Caring” and, in appropriate conservative fashion, he makes this argument through difficult-to-verify anecdotal hearsay, because genuine arguments are for Nerds. He tells a story of an unnamed boy(because, of course, why would conservatives sympathize with a girl? It’s important to understand the priorities of those you’re lying to), heard from a staffer of a friend, who received free lunches. He says this staffer told his friend, who told him, the boy told her(games of telephone add such clarity) “he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.” Someone who cared for him. So you see, the world is upside down apparently: Liberals caring that a child not starve is not caring, whereas Conservatives not caring if a child starves is the selfless act of a charitable spirit. Now how disgusting is that? What kind of a person uses language to present feelings of empathy and community as malice, and indifference as grace? How twisted up and rotten inside does a person have be to turn Care into a rhetorical tool for the promotion of privation and child starvation?But there’s at least one other problem with this. For instance: who eats bag lunches anymore? I don’t know, maybe fashions have changed since my time in the public education system, but what I remembered were cafeteria lines, bustling long-tables, parents too busy prepping for their own work day to throw together a lunch at 6AM, and lunch cards. People didn’t bring there own food and they didn’t have a place to keep it safe even if they did(no lockers they got it from the school kitchens whether they were on government programs or not. So I have to ask: where the HELL is this story even coming from, the 50s? Leave It to Beaver?? Cause honestly, it ain’t any kind of story I ever heard, or that bears any kind of resemblance to any reality I ever lived. Fantasies about 60s Sitcom Brownbag school picnics are a damn fool basis for policy, particularly when peddled by the running-dog of a Pill-Popping Narcissist. -- source link

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