Americans getting pissed off at Europeans constantly making fun of them… And yet I’m still learning more ridiculous bullshit about that country.
Jesus christ, what a sad joke.
We get pissed off because we don’t have socialized medicine for those burns.
But you don’t understand, we have happy billionaires! That’s all that really matters in life. Children can fuck off, billionaires is where it’s at.
The average quality of life is quite high! Hmm didn’t Twain say something about this situation…
Are they though?
No, sadly they actually aren’t happy. There’s still money out there that isn’t in their bank account. It drives them insane knowing “their” money is still in someone else’s bank account.
It drives billionaires insane know that they are losing at the imaginary numbers game.
There are some states that feed kids as a matter of routine state budgeting. Those kids get a lunch paid for by taxpayers. A damn fine investment of tax dollars, if you ask me.
Tim Walz is governor of one of these states.
I agree feeding children is an unequivocally great use of tax dollars.
Here we parents have to pay. But parents that cannot afford it can contact the authorities and get government funds for that without their children (and their friends) to ever learn about that.
My uncle: “AIN’T NO BROWN KID EVER GONNA EAT ON MY DIME DODGAMMIT!”
He and all his friends are voting, you should too.
If people think schools feeding kids is a waste of tax dollars, imagine how much of a waste it is to try to teach hungry children.
Schools provide lunch to ANYONE who shows up needing lunch in my county.
Year round.
Adults can come, they can bring children not old enough to go to school and they can come alone.
They don’t sit in the cafeteria with the kids during the school year BUT they can pick up a free lunch from the kitchen.
Turns out feeding people costs less than hungry people (which is how they keep justifying it to the people who want to take it away) AND it’s the right thing to do.
It’s only the right thing to do if your interests do not include oppressing voters and hoarding wealth.
This isn’t unique to America. It happens across Europe too.
I’ve been across Europe. Gone to school in Ireland, The Netherlands, France, Sweden, and Denmark. I have NEVER seen this.
This definitely happens in France and the UK. I saw the latter first hand.
I have a little brother and little sister who still go to school in France. I’ll ask them about it.
When I was in school the less well-off kids got their lunch free. There was definitely no equivalent to a “marker” the linked article mentions, unless you include the lunch ticket. I was actually kind of jealous at the time, I didn’t understand why I had to pay when I didn’t bring my own lunch and they didn’t.
Singling out kids because their parents can’t afford food is kind of fucked up.
It’s been a while since I was in school, but my wife is a teacher here in the UK. The packed lunch area was often where the poor kids were, and we also had issues where (in their infinite wisdom) the school gave kids on free school meals a special card to get a specific meal (and nothing more). They may as well have stamped “bully me” on their foreheads.
Nowadays, schools are smart enough to use prepaid card systems where free school meals are preloaded on the same cards. My wife’s old school used to put the same restrictions, but now it’s far harder to determine who gets the free meals.
The packed lunch crowd does still get a lot of scrutiny, though, especially those that shop in “less favourable” stores. Buy your lunch from farmfoods and you’re asking to be picked on. It’s fucked up, and social media has made things SO much worse, but ultimately kids are often extremely cruel.
In California, school lunch is paid by the state. It’s awesome and solves this problem. All the kids get the same lunch for free. Some kids still bring their lunch, but it’s rare.
In foster care we were part of the free lunch program. The first week in my first high school the lunch lady made it a point to call us all up first so EVERYONE knew who the ‘poors’ were. This was in one of the top 5 most expensive zipcodes in the U.S.
For the next four years I ate knowledge in the library for lunch.
Yeah, but what I’m saying is that’s not a thing anymore in California, they just have free lunch for all the kids, and you don’t need to be “a poor” to get it
Yes and that’s wonderful and everywhere should implement it.
But they won’t.
Because people are fundamentally assholes. Just California has a lower quotient due to higher education (though hollywood does skew that a bunch too)
My kids’ school did this a while back and even though I didn’t have any issues buying their lunches not having to manage their account was nice. And since they also got breakfast it was one less thing I had to do before getting them on the bus.
Yeah, they technically offer breakfast for our kids too, but I’d have to get them ready and to school like 30 minutes early. I don’t do mornings like that.
Same in the uk
I went to secondary school at the turn of the millennium and I remember having to go to admin to get my dinner tickets on a Monday, which were worth £1.30, but there was never any shame in it because I don’t think too many kids knew the significance of it; in fact, my mate Danny would always want to buy them off me for £1.50 apiece. This other lad called Liam would sometimes lord it over me because his mum gave him £2 a day for his dinner, but by year 11 he was roundly known as a bit of a prick if I recall correctly, so I was even vindicated in the end.
Wait wait wait, waaaaaaait a fucking minute, this is done by the school itself, as in the bloody adults running the goddamn thing?
Holy hell
It’s disgusting. When my son was very young, my wife and I struggled to make ends meet, and got behind on his school lunch payments (I still can’t believe that’s even a thing). The lunch lady at his school would lecture him about how much we owed, and how he shouldn’t get to eat for free just because we were lazy or whatever. He’d come home thinking he was in trouble. America hates poor people.
No. Not even close to OK. There are examples of light in the darkness, such as Tim Walz (Kamala Harris’ running mate) who as the governor of Minnesota enacted a law to make school lunches free for all. Kids don’t get to decide who they are born to, and hungry kids don’t learn nearly as well as fed kids. Educated kids help our future, so it’s an extremely high ROI.
It’s OK, we’re dealing with this by repealing our child labor laws, so kids can work at the meat processing plant instead of some immigrant. Two birds, one stone.
Brought to you by luxury lectern spender (at taxpayer’s expense!) and Weird 34 sycophant Gov. Sarah Sanders of Arkansas.
Nope! Lol
Does it look like we’re ok?
From Texas. When I was in elementary school circa 2000, we had a running balance that our parents could contribute to via written checks.
My parents were going through a divorce back then, and in the pinging back and forth between my parents houses, it always gave me so much anxiety buying lunch at school. You wouldn’t know if your account could cover what you picked up in the lunch line until you got to the cashier at the end. AND if it couldn’t, they would literally take all of the food you put on your tray and give you a PB&J sandwich.
Having elementary school kids keep up with their balances was tough, and even when I did remember, if I were with my dad, he would refuse to give lunch money to my sister and me because “that’s what child support is for.”
It just sucked all around and made me feel like the smallest human on earth. And I know that this experience here was not unique to me.
Sounds like a real class act. I bet he still doesn’t know why he couldn’t make his marriage work.
As a Canadian, I’m like:
You guys are getting food?
(School cafeterias with food service beyond selling terrible premade sandwiches for people who forgot their lunch are rare below college level and AFAIK what few exist all operate like a fast-food restaurant, where everyone pays for their meal then and there.)
In Russia, certain groups of kids (children of low-income parents, of families with 3+ kids, orphans) receive a special ticket, one per day, allowing them to have a school lunch for free.
Sometimes they share unused ones (tickets don’t have names on them), which practically guarantees there’s a bunch of kids on their side - everyone wants free lunch.
And generally it was more of a thing to flash, not something to be shamed for.
Ffs America. You can just provide a service, not everything has to turn a profit.
Hol’ up, that sounds like communism.
See what you’ve done there is confuse a system of governance with compassion and humanity.
“Compassion” and “humanity”. What’s that? More communism?
It’s giving a damn about people and their loved one’s well being and standard of living, rather than seeing them as unworthy burdens on society.
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
…and I’ll mine their labour for profit before casting them back into their slums.
(my posts were being ironic, sorry if you thought i was being sincere)
It’s cool, I knew. I’m from a nation that both recognises and appreciates sarcasm. And basic human rights.
I pay thousands per year in school taxes and the vast majority goes to school administrators making 6 figures. We can’t just toss more money at schools to fix this - we need legislation stating how the money is used. The money needs to go to the kids and teachers instead of clueless rich people.
Vote in your local elections, join the PTA, tell your friends how fucked it is and ask them to vote. You can’t legislate yourself out of this as school boards regularly mismanage funds for decades.
Dude, read the room. We are in the era of the oligarch.
MOST money will go to the clueless rich who do not need it and we will continue to slide into french revolution levels of wealth gap.
That’s what happend at my highschool. There was a year we couldn’t even afford paper but we were a school of over 2000 kids. Not a wealthy area by any means, but with all those taxes from all those families you’d think basic supplies wouldn’t be an issue.
It wouldn’t have been an issue if one of the administrators wasn’t fucking stealing money from us… I don’t even mean they had too high of a salary, I mean they were literally stealing money…
You watched the John Oliver episode, didn’t you?
Was gonna make this exact comment haha. It was a good episode.
america are you ok?
