Feelgood Dystopia

Back in 2013 Jack Kingston, a Republican House Representative from Georgia, made a case against free school-lunches for kids. He said that "getting the myth out of their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch", would be good for society as a whole. He suggested that children from families below 130 percent of the federal poverty line should do janitorial labor, like sweeping the floor of the cafeteria, to earn their lunch.

This is such a dumb and inhuman proposal, and fortunately it didn't get much attention or follow-through. But there's a real chance this proposal, or something similar, will come back in these times of increased inflation and austerity. In America there's the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which provides low-cost or free lunches to children, and it may be the most obvious place to see the class-division that gives some a head-start while leaving others behind. Children from families at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line can receive a free lunch. Between 130 and 185 percent of the Federal poverty line can receive a reduced-price lunch. And children from families above 185 percent of the Federal poverty line can receive a low-cost, full price lunch.

Back to the dystopian idea of letting poor children do labor for their lunch. This would stigmatize and traumatize poor children even more, as the children from well-off families would make fun of them. Children can be brutal; the rich kids would dump their trash on the floor and say to the poor kids, "You can clean that up, because your parents are poor!" Like this article says, it would be scarring poor kids for life, as well as give a whole new generation of non-poor kids ample practice time to develop into assholes. To solve the problem of poor kids going hungry, because some parents don't understand the application-process to apply for the free lunches and some simply don't qualify, the increasing school lunch debts, and to create equality between children who are blameless for their parents' financial situation, is to make all school lunches free for everyone. This works, as has been shown during the pandemic when the government offered federal assistance that paid for school meals for more than 50 million students.

USA Today reported on 11 January 2023 that schools have accrued more than $19 million in unpaid meal debt, according to a new survey from the School Nutrition Association. School lunch debts aren't new though and poor children have been going hungry at school for decades. And the sad reality is that, as a result, some children are working to get rid of the school lunch debts. The irony is that it's children from middle-class families that are doing this, raising money to pay off the debts accrued by children from poor families, as a form of charity. The story of two sisters, 11 and 13 years old, starting a lemonade stand to raise awareness around the nationwide issue of "lunch shaming", reached the headlines in 2019:

Hailey and Hannah Hager are on a mission to help a North Carolina school district pay down over $41,000 worth of lunch money debt - one cup of lemonade at a time.
_{source: Today}

This story, and countless more like it, fall under the heading of "Perseverance Porn", so called "feelgood stories" that cover up serious systemic problems. Children shouldn't have to go hungry, not at school, not anywhere. Also the elderly shouldn't have to work in order to live a dignified life in the autumn and winter of their life, but just recently news broke about an 82 year old Walmart cashier who could finally retire, but only after someone started a GoFundMe campaign that raised $108,000; this was also brought as a positive feelgood story, when in all fairness it should be taken as a story of deep systemic injustice.

Hyper-individualism is what it all comes down to. All these stories are about individual victims and, more importantly, individual heroes who, out of the goodness of their hearts, come to the rescue. As much as I applaud the efforts of these heroes, and they are heroes, they shouldn't be lifted up on a pedestal. Instead, the injustice that gave rise to this whole victim-hero-dynamic should be condemned. Loudly. These people shouldn't be depending on the individual whims of charitable people, but should instead rely on society as a whole to have their basic needs taken care of. Raise taxes on the rich, corporations and wealth; that's the simple solution to this problem. Not everyone will be lucky enough to have a GoFundMe started for them. Not every school kid will have two sisters start a successful lemonade stand to pay off their school lunch debts. And besides that, it's just fundamentally wrong to have individuals solve systemic problems.

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