Public Schools Finally Teaching Conservatism

For decades, conservatives have fretted over the leftist indoctrination performed by our public schools, with the result that "Democrat" is the default choice of young voters until they've experienced enough real life to learn otherwise which many never do.  Any number of studies of political preferences in higher education have shown that there are more professors registered as members of the Communist Party than of the Republican, and too many high schools are little better.

Thanks to the hard work of Michelle Obama, though, this year high school students are enduring a course in hard-core conservatism, with serious case studies on the principles of federalism, subsidiarity, and the excesses of big government.  The South Carolina Morning News reports:

When hundreds of students crowded into the West Florence High School cafeteria last Monday, they were excited to talk with friends and refuel for the remainder of the first day of school. But they quickly realized there was something different. The third lunch line that used to dish out slices of take-out pizza and baskets of french fries now served the same school lunch food as the others with more salad.

Sophomore Madeline Taylor noticed that hardly anyone was eating.

“The entire rest of the day all I heard about was how hungry everyone was,” she said.

For years now, American students have gotten used to the idea that their school provides lunch - free in many cases, for a nominal fee in others.  Like everything else in their American lives, these students expect their choices and preferences to be catered to, and while complaining about what's on offer in the lunch line is a staple of American adolescence, most of the time most kids find something tolerable.

Not this year!  In a stunning development that is unimaginable in any private-sector environment they've experienced, from McDonald's to Taco Bell, the overwhelmingly most popular foodstuffs have been discontinued.  Horror of horrors, the pizza and fries were replaced with rabbit food!

Ms. Taylor, who no doubt can look forward to a stellar career in Democratic politics, followed the example of her President and decided to do some community organizing.  In an act of bold leadership, she... started an online petition for the return of the junk food.

With 607 supporters as of this writing, her petition has been a success by the standards of postmodernism.  In the real world, however, it's a total failure: nothing has changed in the lunchroom.

Are Ms.Taylor and her fellow pupils being gleefully oppressed by The Man?  Maybe so, but certainly not by The Man she sees in the principal's office; the school administration would be happy to give the people what they want.

Unfortunately, the days of local schools having any power over even something so trivial as the menu choices are long since over:

“Basically it’s federal regulations,” Donnie Chavis, Florence 1 food services director, tells the Morning News. “That’s where the whole thing came from is the federal government. It’s actually an interim rule, meaning it is not finalized yet. So there could be changes and if a lot of parents want to contact their congressmen, I’m not advocating that, but that’s how it would change. There’s nothing we can do.”

The Suffocating Hand of Big Government

It sounds ridiculous but Ms. Chavis is correct: restoring pizza would take an act of Congress.  Though no living soul has ever voted for Michelle Obama for anything, she has used her political connections to induce federal bureaucrats, who also never were elected, to ban foods that, in her august opinion, are unhealthy.  So that's that; the only way to undo it would, indeed, be for Congress to explicitly do so with a law.

But what Congressman would ever vote for the Pizza and French Fries Restoration Act?  Think of the ads condemning them for "hating the children" by dooming them to obesity and an early grave!

No, an important element of freedom and liberty simply vanishes into the past by the whim of a busybody and the pen of a minion.  That is what big government tyranny is all about - and now the students have an essential object lesson in the unfixable misery that results.

Should they care enough to seek out a history book from their local public library, they might discover that within living memory, local schools made their own decisions that best suited the needs of the people using them.  When there was a problem, people could protest to the principal, the mayor, or the school board, and something might actually get done to fix it.  Now that's impossible.

When all the powers of government are held by the highest level of government which is so big and far away that it's no longer responsive to individuals down on the ground, it doesn't matter if there are free and fair elections every few years; we are living in a tyranny all the same.  These kids are learning the sort of country they live in and, just possibly, they might wish to change it when they're older.

Assuming they don't starve to death in the meantime.  In which case, they themselves will be an object lesson of another once-famous saying: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."