Safety

Dear Friends and Followers:
I found this on Big Dope's computer and couldn't resist sharing.
C.W.

There was news this week about a school in Utah where the officials took an unusual step in dealing with school lunch payments in arrears. After dispensing meals one noontime, officials went around and seized the trays of the kids whose lunches hadn’t been paid for and threw them in the trash. Problem solved.

Now these were not kids on the “Free Lunch Program” but simply were those whose parents had not paid for the lunches in a timely fashion.

Still, it made me think of the Free Lunch Program, a friend I had while serving in the United States Navy, and a former professional football player. Let’s see if I can connect the dots.

I teach a course at a local university. The course is “Intro to Public Administration” and the class members are juniors and seniors taking it as an elective. So, it is not “their first rodeo” and we have some wonderful and spirited discussions.

Each time I teach it, the subject of the free lunch program seems to arise. It is simply heartbreaking to hear a young woman talk of the shame associated with being identified, before her classmates, as one on the Free Lunch Program. It is evidently a mark of shame she will carry with her for the rest of her life.

Now, to my “beloved” USN. While waiting for deployment to Vietnam, I shared a temporary posting in Monterey, California with a troubled man named Bob. We were both beset by unhappiness. Mine was from a temporary habit but his was deeply rooted. He owned a car and we would go for long rides along the coastal highway and bemoan our fates. We once drove to the gates of a compound owned by Joan Baez where, it was rumored, one could gain passage to Canada. I don’t know. We “chickened out” at the last moment.

Anyway, Bob had a favorite allegory. “Jimmie,” he would say, “when a child is born into this world, they give him a bucket. As he goes through life, they keep adding s**t into that bucket until someday, he won’t be able to move ‘cause it is so heavy.”

It was not the most positive personal philosophy I have ever heard, but it was entertaining, the way he would rant on about it.

I don’t know what happened to him eventually. He disappeared one day and I didn’t hear from him until just before I shipped out. I was called to “The Deck” and told, by a frowning Officer-in-Charge, that I had a call and to make it quick. So I will.

It was Bob calling from the “nut-ward” at the Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco Bay. “What are you doing there?” I said.

“I just gave my bucket of s**t away,” he yelled. Then they took the phone from him and, I suppose, led him away.

Aren't there some things that your species
believes young kids shouldn't have to
worry about? - C.W.

Now the football player: I read this week where a former pro football player, now an exec with the NFL, said he didn’t believe in social “safety nets,” which was why he voted conservative.

I just couldn’t help thinking about a young child standing to be identified forever as a burden to society and what it must mean to carry that through life.

And then, I thought of buckets of s**t. Well, I also thought about pieces of s**t.

See his latest book at Wattensaw Press.

168.Stamping

We were in the midst of one of our marathon question and answer sessions. They wear me out, but it’s what C.W. is here for so I can’t avoid them. When he appears as the Prudent Student, complete with thick-lensed eyeglass, a backpack and a shirt pocket full of pens of every color imaginable, I know I’m in for it.

We had already covered the subject of paying a football coach whose team loses games a salary in excess of $3million a year, why we place such emphasis on winning, and why we seem to be phasing science out of our high school curricula. He was getting exasperated and I was becoming despondent.

“Now,” he said as he selected a purple pen from his pocket and poised it over his notepad. “tell me about this new decision by members of your congress to quit funding the bringing down of one's foot heavily on food.”

“Say what?”

“Don’t you read your newspapers?”

“Not always. It scares me and I can’t sleep.”

“Hmmm,” he said and he made a note on the pad.

“A foot? On food?” I said.

“It’s all over the news. Your state’s four congressmen just voted to cut funding for it.”

“Do you mean ‘the stamping’ of food?”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“You need to adjust your Galactic Universal Translator again," I said. "It is undependable.”

“I trust my GUT,” he said.

I rolled over laughing. He falls for it every time.

“What?” he said.

“I think you are talking about food stamps,” I said.

“Precisely,” he said. “Now why do your congressmen find them so repugnant?”

“I dunno,” I said. “Someone told them to, I suppose.”

“Aren’t they designed to help the poor and, how do you say it … the ‘least of those’ among you?”

“The congressmen?”

“No. Food stamps. Please be serious.” He was getting testy now so I focused on the question.”

“That is exactly what food stamps are designed to do. Help the poor.”

“So,” he said taking notes again. “if I am a mother of three children whose husband suddenly departs the scene by accident or choice, and I am, how do you say it … ‘without the basic necessities of life’ …”?

“Destitute.”

“Of course. So I am one for whom food stamps are intended.”

“One of the types, yes.”

“Or, say,” he said. “that I am a father who is stricken with a sudden illness and can no longer earn money to feed my family. I might rely on this expression of love and support from my fellow humans?”

“Something like that.”

“Perhaps I am the brother of a man who is killed along with his wife in a terrible accident and I take in his children and need help feeding them.”

“Society to the rescue,” I said.

“A damaged veteran of one of your many wars?”

“Ditto.”

“Children of your so-called Mississippi River delta who cannot escape their poverty?”

It seems to me that what your species needs
is a philosophy that teaches love for the poor. - C.W.

“Can we talk about something else?”

“One more question please.”

“What?”

“These congressmen of yours … they made this decision while well-fed and comfortable?”

“Quite so.”

Rarely does C.W. shift shapes in my presence, but this was one of those times. As I watched, he changed from a bright-eyed student into a tired old man. When the change was complete, he looked at me and I’ll swear that I saw a long line of tired and hungry people marching across his face.

“I have much to learn about your species,” he said. “I only hope my heart can stand it.”