Tuesday, March 16, 2004

The People are Sheep...
Found this interesting, and decided to comment. You can find it here: http://www.indystar.com/articles/3/129240-2413-010.html

Now, why the good people of Minnesota feel it is necessary to tell folks how to feed themselves properly is beyond me. I can see, perhaps, the argument being made that welfare money is given to those deemed worthy so that they might do something responsible with it, i.e. indulging in healthy eating habits, and not, let's say, gorging oneself on Dorito's and Devil Dogs.

Then again, it should also occur to those who wish to lead by the nose that the people being given the welfare money in the first place very often cannot be commended on their personal choices to begin with. If you're a crack-addicted, mother of four by way of multiple sexual partners, it can be resaonably be assumed that if you're profligate with your sexual organs, then MSG content in your potato chips is not high on your list of priorities.

But of course, someone has already figured this out. Someone, somewhere, in the Minnesota governmental (and we do mean mental) structure (I'd bet on a woman) has finally ascertained the single, universal truth, vis-a-vis most welfare recipients: they're typically dumber than dogshit. Stupid people must be told what to do and coerced to make the proper decisions before they do something inconvenient, like die in the street in large numbers or turn to crime. Therefore, we start by telling them what to eat.

Let's first define the relative merits of the word poverty. Are America's poor living at near-starvation levels like the poor of Sub-Saharan Africa? No. Are they picking through garbage dumps looking for cabbage leaves or animal dung looking for undigested seeds, like they do in Central America? Certainly not. Are they dying in droves of tropical diseases and as the result of tribal and religious warfare, say like in South-East Asia and the Middle East? Hell no.

According to the census bureau, a great number of the people we classify as "poor" own their own home. They typically have cable and color television, air conditioning and at least one car. They have access to public-supported education and health care, food stamps, mass-transit subsidies and have their "poverty" counted a s a virtue when enrolling in college.

Quite simply, we do not have poor people in this country. What we have is stupid, lazy, unmotivated people lying around on the public dole. When you live in a society that affords the opportunities and privledges this one does, you have no excuse for collecting a government check. Get off your fat behind and work for a living.

However, this does not give government the right to tell you what you can eat. It is just another example of the nanny-state gone wild: we must protect people from their own stupidity, therefore, we can tell you what to do. It's only a short step from telling you what to eat to whom you may vote for, what you may learn in school and, eventually, what you can do and when you can do it. But that's the point, isn't it -- to create sucessive generations of mindless robots that reflexively do what Big Brother tells them to?

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