When Eating Lunch Is No Longer Appetizing

by Harry Goslin

Public schools claim to be doing everything they can to prepare students for the “real world.”  By spending enormous sums of money to teach what many children can learn in a short period of time with minimal guidance and interference from adults--literacy, math skills, and a genuine love of learning--public schools are prepping students that life’s most simple challenges require complicated and costly solutions.  Perhaps that is the intent.  For the occasional student who sees through the system-wide scam, there’s always the resort to labeling such an individual a dangerous, anti-social crackpot.   

If the system proves successful, the majority of adult cloned thinkers will nod in agreement and close their eyes and ears to collective efforts to ostracize or otherwise destroy the individual who dares to think alone.  School districts are always seeking new ways to immerse students into the state’s personal surveillance system and condition them to accept it as a requirement of life in a complex, modern society.  By the time these kids grow to adulthood, the surveillance system in place will surely equal or exceed that depicted in Minority Report.   

CNN reported a few days ago that a handful of school districts across the country have started offering parents online access to what their kids are eating in school.  A select number of districts have started using software developed by Horizon Software International.  Cited as one example in the article is Marietta School District (GA), after “concerned parents” prompted Horizon to “develop the online meal-monitoring option.”  Prior to this outcry of concern, parents were only able to put money in an account, and have the kids spend down the balance as each week progressed.  The accounts then needed to be recharged for succeeding weeks.  Originally designed for convenience, parents had no way of knowing exactly what their kids were eating at school.  

When the nationwide “crisis” of childhood obesity struck, it was only a matter of time before the schools, acting in loco parentis, would be the logical means to cure this collective disease.  With this new tracking program, it’s not only the kids whose parents put their lunch money in an account that are tracked, all students who buy their lunch at school have their purchases entered into a database that can be accessed by parents at home through the internet.  Even kids who pay cash have their purchases tracked.  No more sneaking cookies or chips at school; one click of the mouse and mom’s got the goods on junior.  As CNN stated, “Health officials hope it will increase parents’ involvement in what their kids eat at school.”  

Maybe this will prove to be a good system.  It still provides convenience.  Setting up a lunch account avoids the possibility that lunch money will be lost, stolen, or used to purchase drugs.  By allowing parents to access what their kids buy at school to eat, “Mealpay.com,” as the system is known, provides overbearing and annoying parents with lecture material in the event they cannot find other things to rag their kids about at the end of the day.   

The system would also train students for the utopia of the future when choice is irrelevant to personal satisfaction and no longer detrimental to the common good.  As one obesity “expert,” Douglas Kamerow, quoted in the article said, “The problem in general is the a la carte system.  Now you can buy french fries, chips, and a Coke and it’s called lunch.”  Having too many choices can be annoying and frustrating.  Better to train kids to accept less now so that when they are adults they can be counted on to respond to no more than two, maybe three options for everything.  Employers would be happier, marketing would be easier, and our glorious system of voting would continue to operate as the best “A” or “B” system on the face of the earth.    

Probably the best feature of this system is the preparation kids receive in the total surveillance state being erected in our lifetimes.  The minor intrusiveness of allowing mommy and daddy to find out what they eat at school will be very useful in conditioning kids to readily accept their life-long mommy and daddy--the state--and all of its necessary intrusiveness to protect the public welfare, grow the economy, and provide national security.   

All the pissing and moaning anarcho-capitalists and principled libertarians do now about the Patriot Act, Real ID, the drug war, the war on terrorism, violations of civil liberties, and so on and so forth, will certainly fall on deaf ears in the future once this system goes online across the entire public education system.  Critics of the left and right alike would probably not be safe in this future world, purged of the poisonous variety of opinion and philosophy that is still bantered about today as the foundation of the total surveillance state is being poured.  

Life would probably be better without these crazies venting their hateful and treasonous gibberish, anyway.  They have a real bad habit of pointing out the obvious and bringing to light the lies, corruption, and tyranny of the establishment.  For instance, let’s return to the obesity expert’s concern with what constitutes “lunch.”  My dictionary defines lunch as “a meal eaten at midday .”  Nothing in that definition says anything about the contents of lunch or whether what is eaten by one person offends the sensibilities of another.  Timing, not content, is the real issue of lunch.  With the proper training now, children will grow to see these people and such profane and insulting examples of reality for what they are: dangerous to peace and established order.  

It might take a few generations, but the establishment types are patient.  As John Taylor Gatto documents in The Underground History of American Education, many of these people have gone to their graves over the past century and a half, consoled in the belief that the creation of an individualist-proof social system of obedient drones would be their lasting contribution to the socialist/collectivist utopia of the future.  Someday, with continuous and unrelenting effort, it would be accomplished.   

Eating lunch should be a simple exercise necessary to maintain strength and focus until dinner.  For millions of students in this country, that simple exercise is soon to become complicated and fraught with the threat of punishment for what they have chosen to eat for lunch.  No longer will a call from a teacher or the principal be necessary to invoke fear of coming home.  Little do students realize that this lunch tracking system is just another method to condition them to embrace the surveillance state as necessary to promoting good citizenship, economic growth, and national security.  They’re probably better off staying ignorant; the truth is enough to make a thinking person lose their appetite.