Dealing with hunger...

I was so disgusted about comments made by a Missouri state representative named Cynthia Davis in July concerning the free school lunch program. Yes, she's a Republican, of course, and from her Republican DNA, she had real problems with the idea that hungry children in Missouri would get free lunches. She made startling stupid comments about "hunger being a great motivator" and implied that children should instead get jobs at McDonald's.

The free school lunch program is probably the best national and worldwide effort to reduce hunger and advance education. It provides hungry children with at least one good meal per day, which helps them concentrate and learn better in school. It encourages parents to keep their children in school. The longer a child stays in school, the less likely that child will end up having children at an early age and continuing the cycle of poverty. And children who stay in school and get an education are more likely to move out of poverty, becoming more productive citizens.

Davis should have expanded her brain cells with a little research. She should have responded as U.S. Senator George McGovern responded, when he wrote about hunger in his book "The Third Freedom" and a scene he particularly remembered.

McGovern wrote: The scene that especially moved me was filmed in a school that required all the students to go to the cafeteria at lunchtime, including those unable to eat because they didn't have the money to pay for lunch. The federal school lunch program had been operating since 1946, but as recently as 1968, it did not provide lunches to the poorest children, who could not pay the modest cost. The cameraman focused on a little boy of 9 or 10 who was standing at the rear of the cafeteria watching the other children eat. "What do you think standing here while your classmates are eating?" asked the TV reporter. Lowering his head and looking at the floor, the boy replied softly, "I'm ashamed." "Why are you ashamed?" the reporter asked. "Because," the boy said, "I ain't got no money." That night, sitting in my comfortable home in northwest Washington with my wife and children nearby, I, too, was ashamed. I was ashamed because I hadn't known more about hunger in my own land. I was ashamed that a federal program I was supposed to know all about permitted youngsters to go hungry even as they watched paying classmates eat before their eyes. It was not the little boy who should feel ashamed, I thought. It was I, a U.S. senator living in comfort, who should feel ashamed that there are hungry people--young and old--in my own beloved country.

Now, the difference between Davis' view (that the hunger of children is the responsibility of themselves or their parents) and McGovern's view (that hunger is a problem that needs the wider action of society, including those who are well-fed) is the fundamental difference between the political ideologies and the range of public servants within our system. To me, "public servant" should mean "servant" to the public, serving the public. And I would say that Davis, with her flippant and uninformed remarks, failed and shamed the role of "servant-to-the-people."