Today I decided to have lunch with my son who is in 3rd grade. I stopped off at McDonald’s and got him a Mighty Kid’s meal. I’m going to be a hero today. I stopped in the front office and announced that I’d like to have lunch with my son. A grey-haired woman in the office glared at me and said, “Not with that you’re not!” Instantly my adrenaline started pumping. I did not like being spoken to like that.
She then follows up with, “You are not allowed to bring fast food into the school”. I said, “Who are you to decide what my son can or cannot eat?” She then said, “They are in the guidelines handed out at the beginning of the year and it’s a federal regulation.” I then said, “Who is the federal government to decide what my son can or cannot eat?” I asked her, “What if I put it in his lunch box with some Twinkies? Are you going to search their lunch everyday?” She then told me I should put it in his lunch box. I then said that is exactly my point. What difference does the container make?
I then asked them how do they enforce this regulation? Are they going to expel my son from school if he eats “unhealthy” food? What if I wasn’t such a nice guy and decided to bring him this lunch anyways? They said they would stop me. I asked them how they would do that? Would they chase me down the hall and tackle me? Would they call the police and have me arrested for feeding my son McDonald’s? The grey-haired lady showed great restraint toward my antagonistic yet justified responses. She suggested that I have a picnic outside instead which I agreed to and she promptly went off to fetch my son. She never did rejoin the conversation that I continued with the other women in the office who seemed to relate to my position a bit better. They tried to argue that it wasn’t fair to the other student’s to eat that in front of them. “LIFE ISN’T FAIR!”, I announced. What’s next? “It’s not fair he has better sneakers than me. It’s not fair he got a better grade than me. It’s not fair, he’s taller than me.”
The final straw was when they told me that THEY ARE SERVING HAMBURGERS TODAY IN THE CAFETERIA! Did you ever just want to pull all your hair out? Our freedoms are eroding so slowly that they are going to go unnoticed until it is too late. Once they are gone, we’ll never get them back. I felt bad about shooting the messenger, but we have to stand up for ourselves when our rights are being trampled upon.
Technorati Tags freedom, fascism, elementary school
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