Resetting the moral compass

Here’s one for the folks crusading for “traditional family values:’

How do you have a family dinner when there’s nothing for dinner for the family?

Yeah, Thanksgivings coming. Let’s talk about food, and the people who don’t have enough of it.

Let’s be straight up about why anybody in this town doesn’t have enough food to eat. It sure isn’t because we don’t have enough groceries to go around. There’s way more food here than we can eat and most of us eat way too much of it for our own good. As a community, we have plenty, way plenty, of food. The only reason anyone living here doesn’t have enough food to eat is that they don’t have money to buy it.

And they have the misfortune to live in a country where we appear to value money way more than we value each other.

So we throw out food while kids go hungry.

Sometimes we do it right before their very eyes.

Like they did in Richfield, Minn., a couple of weeks ago.

Public school employees took lunch trays from students in the school cafeteria and dumped the food in the garbage while the children watched. The reason? The kids’ parents had fallen behind on the child’s lunch account. Better, it seems, the food go to the dump than a hungry child have a lunch that wasn’t paid for.

Give that a bit of thought. These are public school employees. We’re paying them. The school lunch program is supported by federal, state and local taxes – again, as the Tea Party partisans are fond of pointing out, supported by our money. So the food we’ve bought and paid for goes in the dumpster, presumably to teach the miscreant parties some kind of lesson.

And what did we teach every child in that lunch room? That we value the price of a plate of institutional food more than we value you.

That’s the message. Straight up and said plain.

It’s the same message that’s sent every time a vote-hungry legislator pledges to save the taxpayer dollar by “cutting the waste out of welfare” and every time a pious politician insists providing folks with darn-near nothing with the basic necessities for a decent, dignified life fosters “a culture of dependence” and, heaven forbid, we can’t have that.

It’s for their own good, you know…

Or that’s what I’m told. Usually by well off white guys who let out their belts after a big meal then grumble about the freeloaders living down the street.

So, explain to me how we instill virtue by letting our neighbors’ kids go hungry? By letting our neighbors go hungry?

Exactly whose moral compass is set right when we throw away a kid’s school lunch?

How are our lives made better by letting our neighbors go without?

What price do we pay when it’s a crime to leave a dog out in the cold, but we let our neighbor sleep on the street?

Yeah, Thanksgiving’s coming. If we’re fortunate we’ll sit down with friends and family for a day of plenty.

And this is a good thing.

But when we do, perhaps we all could reflect for a moment, asking if we’re truly doing unto others as we would have it done unto us? And if not, why not?

Why not, indeed?