The reason liberals piss me off hit me last night like that proverbial ton of bricks. I should qualify my sentiments with two statements, however. First I am a liberal, so I’m not liberal-bashing. The purpose of Pragmatic Liberalism is more of a worldwide comment to the members of my political family. Second, I’ve realized for a while now things that upset me about liberalism; the impetus to speak out and the ability to articulate my anger just became compelling.

The story starts with a cheese sandwich. A story came out yesterday that in New Mexico, children whose parents don’t pay for their lunch receive a cheese sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a carton of milk as a replacement lunch.

In step liberal bloggers.

“How dare these schools shame these children!”
“Schools should provide everything children need.”
“This is just unacceptable. The schools are judging parents who don’t pay for their children’s lunches.”

As I kept coming back to commentary throughout the day, I found myself growing angrier. Despite many, many legitimate comments asking what alternative the school systems should employ, these people who were so “shocked” never responded. Do you know why not?

There is no easy response.

Here are the important points from the story for me.

- This system doesn’t apply to children who qualify for federal free or reduced lunch programs.
- The federal income requirements for the program are as follows for a family of 4: $27,000 a year maximum for free lunch and $39,000 for reduced lunch.
- The Albuquerque school district had $143,000 in unpaid school lunch bills. Since the implementation of this program, parents have paid $93,000 of those bills.
- The school district has no obligation to provide students who do not pay for lunch with anything to eat. The “cheese sandwich lunch” is in lieu of children going hungry.

Okay, so what upsets me so much about the mainstream liberal bloggers?

These bloggers don’t want to solve the problem. They want to hand-wring about what they find wrong with the world. I haven’t seen one person offer a viable alternative. Nor have I seen any suggestion of a blogger-type drive. No one’s trying to get people to pay out the other $48,000 owed to help kids in Albuquerque eat lunch. Instead these folks are simply whining about the woes of a system that doesn’t fit into their ideal world.

In my fantasy life, I imagine a world in which everyone has everything he or she needs. Children are loved, fed, and clothed. They are educated in a system that can take into account their individual needs. We help people have productive adult lives.

I live in a different reality, however. Instead of the educational system I would like to see, I see a system funded (inadequately in many cases) by a combination of federal funds and property taxes. I see school districts with little wiggle room in their budgets after paying for personnel and transportation costs. I see school systems too overburdened to provide for children everything they need for a happy, well-adjusted childhood. Hell, this extends beyond lunches and jackets to academics for me. Students who are exceptional in either direction have a very hard time getting appropriate services. Why?

THERE’S NO MONEY!

School districts don’t have an endless supply of money, and the people who make funding decisions have to determine how to use the limited resources they have. And that’s where we come back to the cheese sandwich. The folks in New Mexico’s school systems couldn’t continue to afford everything, and they opted to cut out free rides for the children of parents who by and large just aren’t paying for their lunch.

That brings us to Pragmatic Liberalism. My goal here is to search out real answers to the problems plaguing our society. You won’t find endless worry about the ills of Super Bowl commercials or repeated commentary on the likes of Westboro Baptist Church. Are those things problems? Yes, they are. They just aren’t the biggest problems. And they aren’t always solvable problems.