Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as the next secretary of Health and Human Services. A Kennedy was brought back to the White House by a Republican. Amazing times indeed!
RFK Jr. has ambitious plans to save America’s kids from an overmedicated, under-exercised, overly diagnosed, epidemic of fragility. I, for one, am glad.
In a recent interview, RFK discussed changes to school lunches. He strikes me as a guy who will thread that needle between what kids need and what they want. RFK seems to know that fitness and good health are found in a mix of have-to and want-to.
School lunches? Well, what’s on the menu? You can put it on the plate but you can’t make them eat it. A hungry kid is still a hungry kid, whether from a lack of food or because the food was just awful. The least nutritious school lunch is the one not eaten.
My sense is that RFK will promote good health through good life choices, couched in a commonsense approach that mixes nutrition with exercise, playtime and more robust living.
Despite having just assumed his new role, liberals immediately attempted to troll RFK before he had a chance to hang pictures in his new office, saying that Michelle Obama had tried to address school lunches and American conservatives lost their minds. Well, that’s a bit of dishonest revisionist history.
Obama lunches were unpalatable dry toast and pablum. The multi-billion-dollar school lunch program championed by the former first lady forced participating schools to make changes. But kids left the nasty, highly rationed food on their trays, defaulting to snack machines in the hallway for Snickers and Coke.
Obama lunches became the stuff of legend on social media, with kids posting pictures of kibbles and bits their dogs wouldn’t eat: three cherry tomatoes and a celery stick, a spoon of high-fiber meat paste on a whole wheat tortilla, and a skinny carton of watery skim milk. It was a failure from the get-go. It was an agenda couched in a lunch program.
But the Biden administration took lunchroom manipulation to new heights. In 2022 the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which doles out all the money for free and reduced lunches to schools around the nation, directed all state agencies and Food and Nutrition Service program operators to conform to new gender ideology guidelines or lose their nutrition grants.
In essence, liberals thought nothing of kids having their lunch held hostage unless conformity to transgender ideology was achieved. Does that sound like a group of folks who care about kids?
There were decades of American kids eating square pizza, tater tots, and applesauce with a half-pint of whole milk. We drank from garden hoses, rode in the back of pickup trucks, ran in flat-bottom Keds, drank sugary Kool-Aid, and played outside until the street lights came on. We grew up strong, won wars, put a man on the moon, tore down the Iron Curtain, and revolutionized the world economy.
Yes, we had robust meals that we all liked. But we also had roughhousing, scheduled PE classes, patches for the Presidential Fitness Test, after-school sports, and the madness of Red Rover in the parking lot.
It was always about how fast we could ride our bikes. How high we could climb in that big tree. Summers were barefoot, and loose change wasn’t meant for saving – it was meant for running down to the corner store by yourself to buy a comic book and candy.
There were no cry rooms, no trigger words, no gender fluidity, and no month-long celebrations of one demographic over others. We were American kids living our best lives and the world was better for it.
But by God, we still won the Cold War.
To be sure, there are some things we shouldn’t go back to. It would not have been uncommon back in 1975 for your dad to take a long drag off a filterless Camel and turn up the 8-track of Johnny Cash while your 10-year-old self sat in the front passenger seat with a loosely fitting lap seat belt while sucking down sugary root beer from a glass bottle.
I may or may not have just described my own life.
I can joke about this. But am I really joking? Good health and quality of life is about more than just school lunches. It’s about good, solid, Christ-centered, conservative, values-driven options for kids. It’s about life lessons – like telling the truth, playing hard, treating each other well, the value of faith, and loving our country.
But too often children are used by the left as pawns, tools, and a means to an end. Children are a gift from God. But there is an ongoing battle for our kids. There are those who want to inculcate, indoctrinate and vaccinate whether parents want it or not. Liberal progressives know that if they can get their hands on our kids (sometimes literally) and tell them that they are aberrations, or that they should not listen to their parents, or that right is wrong and wrong is right, or that by virtue of their skin color, they are somehow born an oppressor or one of the oppressed, or that the biological sex they were born with is notional regardless of biology, they can destroy values before they are even valued. They can change future adults before they become adults.
They can do all of that and more, and they will use a school lunch to do it.
And that liberal progressive lunch is never free.
To contact Phil or request him for a speaking engagement, go to www.rightsideradio.org.
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