Trotting out children, the younger, the better, to make political points—does that strike you as creepy? Or honest? “If I go up there and bloviate about lunch shaming, they’ll all just laugh at me. But they wouldn’t dare laugh at a kid! They’ll have to sit there and take it from a kid! Heh-heh.”
(Lee Duigon – News With Views) Suddenly we have a lot of adults getting their marching orders from children. Is that shameful, or what? World leaders sit in deferential silence as they’re scolded by a Swedish teenager for not “Doing Something” to “Stop Climate Change”—like, “how dare you” not set up a global government and… and… and… Well, as long as they “Take Action,” the kind of action doesn’t matter.
Accompanied by a bit less drama, the California legislature last week passed a law providing state-funded free lunch to every kid in California’s public schools. This change in public policy has been ascribed to a nine-year-old boy, now a policy adviser: “this amazing young man,” in the words of Gov. Gavin Noisome.
Do we believe this? His heart moved by the plight of his unfortunate classmates who have suffered “lunch shaming” because their parents had failed to pay their school lunch fees, L’il Whatsisname saved up his allowance until he had the $74.80 needed to pay off all the unpaid fees. All on his own, of course. No one put him up to it. And I have a nice bridge for sale.