It’s easy to be self-righteous and stupid when you’ve never known hunger

Sesame Street decides to portray poverty in an attempt to raise awareness and allow the impoverished and hungry children of America to feel recognized and validated and Fox News decides to attack? Shame on these people.

Have they lost their goddamn minds?

I grew up on the free lunch and breakfast program, which required me to raise my hand in order for my teachers tallied the number of free and reduced meals were required for the students in my classroom.

It was embarrassing, isolating and saddening.

It made me wonder why my parents couldn’t feed me while so many other parents could.

It made me feel like something was wrong with me and my family.

Thankfully, I was not hungry very often when I was a child. These programs served me well.

But there were days when I was hungry. Plenty of them.

And I would have loved to have seen someone in the media representing my plight.

I suspect that these idiot pundits on Fox wouldn’t know the first thing about being hungry.  I suspect that they talk about the free and reduced lunch program but have never eaten a meal courtesy of the program.

I suspect that their children have never been required to self-identify themselves in front of their peers as coming from an impoverished family.

This is not Democrat versus Republican.  This is not liberal versus conservative.

This is sanity versus insanity.  Understanding versus ignorance.  Good intentions versus the desire for a sound bite.

If you don’t want to watch the interview, I have pasted a couple of their most inflammatory remarks below:

Fox News anchor Eric Bolling:

I get it, and boy, take this in the right way here, but are we singling out a poverty stricken little girl? Does my son need to see that?  My little boy need to see that’s going on. You don’t single out other groups. You don’t single out the little gay Muppet, or the little black Muppet, or the little Hispanic Muppet do you?  No, they’re are intertwined in the ensemble.

Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus:

Look, it is up to the parents to explain some of the more difficult aspects of life to their children when they feel the time is appropriate, and one of things we do as taxpayer to make sure we don’t have children who go hungry is we have the school lunch program, the school breakfast program, and in some cases the after school snack that we do. We have a lot of programs, so that while it’s not always a great situation we do have some protections in place, and I think it’s not appropriate for PBS and Sesame Street to take it upon themselves to give these more difficult lessons of life to little children.”