https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/26/us/missouri-daken-kramer-school-lunch-debt/index.html
Kids can now eat without breaking the piggy bank – at least, at Thomas Ultican Elementary School – thanks to fifth grader Daken Kramer.
How about instead of asking for donations, the money is just collected through taxes? What a ceazy idea!
I want my taxes to go to burying brown child under rubble in Palestine! (ever conservative ever)
And steal this child's opportunity for gumption? The media's opportunity to placate us with a heart warming story? Deprive us this chance to be outrage?
Taxes steal all of this from us!
How in the hell is he going to obtain his own bootstraps if you're paying for everything with our taxes?!?!?
Let them get jobs in the mine! I've been working there since I was eleven and I turned out just fine!!
Excuse me - I need to go move my lifted ram 2500 before the repo man finds it.
/s
Is the child/family going to do that?
Why is Lemmy like this?
Obviously we all agree the programs should be changed, but this kid/family can't do that themselves. Instead, they've found a way to provide direct action, via community support, which is a core anarchist leftist trope, and should be commended.
It's not a critique of the child. It IS a critique of the system. No one is saying what he did was bad, or that he shouldn't have done it. They're saying HE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO. It's like the heartwarming stories of Americans funding their medical care through go-fund-me. It's horrifying to any sensible person.
Anarchist and Libertarians can care for each other. If there ever was a more clearer justification for actual taxes and government. It's where it's things that would increase access to freedom. Like not having to beg to survive, come into the conversation.
The comment I replied to, as written, comes off as a critique of the child/family's actions.
They have no influence on the macro conditions.
Edit this is like :
"Man saves child from drowning"
Then comment is like "why could the child access a river?"
Like, yeah, we all agree the child should have been supervised around water, but that's not the point of the article. The point is that someone completed a charitable/selfless action.
Lemmy constantly kneejerks to the macro, abstract case and it's silly. Lemmy prefers to complain about out of system variables than commend I'm system variables.
”Children in elementary school should not have debt tied to their name. We have found out that there are high schools that keep seniors from attending prom or walking at graduation if they have stuff like student lunch debt,” Kramer said. “Some families can’t help it. They can’t pay it off.”
In case anyone had any doubts that the cruelty is the point. Stratify children based on their socioeconomic status at the earliest possible opportunity.
In a video shared to his mom’s Facebook, Daken had challenged “friends, family and local businesses to donate what they can to this cause.”
If they’re required to be there by law it’s inhumane to charge them money for food.
Careful now, this is part of the thinking that people [backwardly] use to proselytize for more charter schools, homeschooling, the dissolution of the Department of Education, and a host of other stupid ideas.
They'll see this and say, "yeah, they shouldn't even be required to go to school! so they have to earn a wholesome Christofascist education" or some other nonsense.
Nevertheless, I agree. Food should be a right for everyone.
I’m fine with private schools competing with public services as long as:
Education, infrastructure, healthcare, military protection, and mails services are some of the core services taxpayers should be most happy to invest tax dollars in. These services should feel like we’re getting a great deal for our investment. If anyone wants to spend more on private sector businesses, that’s up to them. But not there’s no need to sabotage the publicly funded services.
Ah yes, another fucking horror story painting a stark picture of the in-progress collapse of our society being dressed up as a happy happy feel good story.
This is what a degeneracy looks like!
Imagine kids having debt for eating, teaches little shits proper about their station in life before they even start! win win win!
Strong conservative values!
It's fucking Missouri, so I'm sure the warrant for his arrest will be issued shortly. Those idiots have to have a law against paying for others school lunch debt.
Crowdfunding campaigns like this are a great way for white communities to avoid the consequences of laws that were mostly designed to emiserate non-white americans.
Why do you make this a white vs not white issue?
Atlanta is full of black millionaires and their school children still go hungry.
It's not a problem with whites, it's a problem with the rich.
You're just a common racist.
Why do you make this a white vs not white issue?
Because that's what the intention is.
Republicans (post civil rights, Dixiecrats before that) specifically target non-white communities with laws designed to hurt them. They can't be as explicit about it as they once were, so they have to find proxy targets. Instead of just jailing blacks, we'll over-enforce drug laws in certain communities. Instead of saying we're trying to starve black families, we'll use 'welfare mothers' as a proxy. The goal is still the same as it was for all of US history - to win votes from whites by promising to take from non-whites. School vouchers. Stop and frisk. Zero tolerance approaches. Gang enforcement units.
But using proxies instead of specifically targeting leads to some collateral emiseration. Luckily, white communities have vastly more intergenerational and communal wealth, so those crafting the laws know that white communities will be more resilient to the kind of damage they intend to inflict.
not a problem with whites, it's a problem with the rich.
Crowdfunding success is heavily racialized. It strongly favours people with more wealth in their extended community or identity group. Poverty is incredibly racialized in the US, especially at the communal rather than individual level.
I certainly agree that rich people enjoy watching all the poors suffer, but here in the US there's still a large demographic beyond just the rich that feel safer when black and brown people are disproportionately targeted for misery.
As productive as this conversation has ever been.
Yes, rich people are more likely to crowdfund their rich friends.
Yes, an century ago America was deeply racist against freed slaves and their children.
My blonde haired blue eyed ass grew up in Chicago regularly having those PBJ cracker rations the nurse had for lunch because my family was dirt poor and getting my ass kicked by my majority black classmates because of the rhetoric people like you spread.
You see your hardships, can't look past the color of your skin, and project.
Again, it's not a race issue, it's a financial class issue.
You see your hardships, can't look past the color of your skin, and project.
I don't see how my 'hardships' as a middle class white australian-american who moved to the US come into it. I'm describing how I observe the US to work.
Yes, rich people are more likely to crowdfund their rich friends.
White people are just more likely to be successful in their crowdfunding, even when poor.
I'm not arguing that there are no poor white people, that's silly. My wife's dad's grew up shoeless and white in rural illinois. The existence of poor white people doesn't disprove the fact non white people are a greater target for deliberate impoverishment.
I'm not deaf to class-based analysis. But this is the US. You just can't talk about class without also talking about how racialized poverty is in most of the country. Crowdfunding is one of the many facits of our society that very clearly reflects that.
I don't see how my 'hardships' as a middle class white australian-american who moved to the US come into it. I'm describing how I observe the US to work.
Oh, so you are just some rando with no business in the conversation throwing muck at the wall.
Gotcha.
Makes it worse that you are spreading that kind of rhetoric.
You know what the difference between a million and a billion dollars is?
About a billion dollars.
Not to mention, your comment kinda glosses over the systemic racism that this country is built on.
35 percent of billionaires are not white.
492 billionaires exist.
It's 2024.
Rich vs poor is a larger issue that white vs not white.
It's not 1700 when all the rich were British, or 1850 when all the rich were white.
All this rhetoric is outdated.
If you want to talk about oppression, talk about the CEO of Infosys and how he has crippled India and a very large stake in global technology.
How about both problems are still an issue?
Billionaires shouldn't exist. All billionaires are bad.
And the US is still a racially divided country because we can't get our shit together due to systemic racist issues that are still here.