Headline writer Matt Drudge linked to a post by CNSNews video producer Eric Scheiner today that basically equates the folks behind Lily the Sesame Street Muppet with ye old Politburo.
Drudge’s headline: SESAME STREET Muppet Touts Entitlements: ‘I Get A Free Breakfast and Lunch’…
Scheiner’s take: “Sesame Street Muppet Pitches Government Dependence: Free Food at School.”
Now that you know the specific evil Sesame Workshop is apparently sanctioning, here’s a bit from Scheiner’s post:
(CNSNews.com) – A “food insecure” Muppet is helping to promote a national “Food for Thought” campaign that teaches poor families to seek out nutritious food and to eat on the taxpayers’ tab.
At the National Press Club on Thursday, Lily the Muppet – who worries about her family not having enough money to feed her properly — pitched free food at school:
“Sometimes we can’t always afford to buy all the food that we need,” Lily said. “I mean, but we’ve been finding lots of ways that we can get help…Yeah, for example, at school I get a free breakfast and a lunch…part of the meal plan.”
Rather than stave off starvation on the public dole, perhaps Drudge and Scheiner are suggesting that the nation’s chronically poor children, many of whom are being raised in food deserts, might sustain themselves on ideology.
Lily’s message is being circulated through schools, hospitals and food assistance programs as part of Sesame Street’s “Food for Thought” multi-media campaign, which includes DVDs and a booklet listing “services that can assist your family” as well as “referrals to social service agencies.”
Organizers say they have produced a million of the kits.
Here’s to a million more. And yes, Matt Drudge, basic nutrition is an entitlement, and making it available to those who can’t yet provide it for themselves is the obligation of any society that styles itself as free and full of opportunity.
As for CNSNews: it’s owned by L. Brent Bozell III‘s Media Research Center, which says it aims to “prove — through sound scientific research — that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values” and to “neutralize [that bias’s] impact on the American political scene”.
How the hell is feeding poor kids a liberal or conservative issue? Is it really more conservative or “traditional” to expect the market to take care of the poor? And even if it is, what are we supposed to do while we wait for all of these layers of regulation and “entitlements” to be peeled back so we can freely suckle Market Mother Wolf? If the private sector has to wait for lower taxes and fewer regulations before it solves the hunger problem in America, to hell with the private sector on this particular issue.
What’s so offensive to a certain radical conservative strain about things like the Food for Thought Campaign? Is it simply hating to be reminded that poor kids actually exist, that they really do go hungry? Is it really only politics? Or, at the end of the day, is it really about hating those kids and their families because of who they are and where they live, and how easy it is to blame them for their misfortune, a reality so inconvenient to certain sacral political beliefs?
Chris Cocca 
A related thought: Several of my students this semester seemed utterly convinced that no-strings-attached gifts are really damaging–both to the giver and to the recipient. They destroy self-sufficiency. They give the recipient a sense of entitlement. They take away recipients’ motivation to do something to improve their lot in life. The true hero is the person who is self-made and self-sufficient.
Grace then becomes, well, evil, evidence of ill will on the giver’s part, and destroying something crucial in the recipient.
I don’t understand this thinking, but it’s out there.
So convenient an ideology, so comforting, that we need not, indeed, should not, make sacrifices in giving to others.
If wonder if that has anything to do with the Ayn Rand resurgence that’s bubbled up through some elements of the Tea Party?
The only explanation that I can fathom is a belief that poor people are not really poor; that if they wanted to, they could just get a high-paying job and buy their own food, and that they do not do so because they prefer subsistence living. How that belief could survive contact with reality is unclear to me, but alternative explanations (i.e., malice) are too terrifying.
very well-said, Chad.
I recall an anecdote from my childhood fostered by Amway parents:
A successful businessman was in line at the grocery store behind a family buying steaks with food-stamps. The businessman inquired what time dinner was being served. They asked why, and he said because he had paid for the meal so he should be invited to eat it.
Don’t simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
Stock prices are actually quoted in fractions for 2 centuries, with different system descended from Spanish items of eight. Each dollar was cut into eight bits worth 12.5 cents each.
The worst is when the auto-posting bot does a good job finding words like “poverty” in post headings but then does a really bad job of leaving a valid url. #SpamFail!