Grinch (photo: moonrat/flickr)

I make it a habit not to listen to Rush Limbaugh because he makes my blood pressure rise and that isn’t good for me, but today my husband played me about a 3 minute video of Mr. Limbaugh complaining that children expect to be fed during the summer.

I kid you not.  The man is complaining about feeding needy children.

It seems that Missouri has a pilot program for feeding students during the school year that is working so well and is so needed that they want to expand it to include feeding needy children in some communities during the summer months when the children are not in school.  Of course this angered Mr. Limbaugh because expanding this program costs $2 million dollars.  After all, that is twice what he is rumored to have paid for the musical talent at his fourth wedding and it will only feed approximately 10,000 children for three months!

During his rant, he said, “School ends and of course how can we expect them to feed themselves in the summer when they haven’t had to for nine months?  So this is how it works. They demand to be fed during the summer.”  Now, lest you think he is sane and talking about adults “demanding” that children be fed, he continues, “Or their acolytes demand that they be fed during the summer because after all we’ve conditioned them to not feeding themselves.  Plus their parents don’t have to take the responsibility of feeding them.”  He ended this little 3 minute rant I heard by calling needy children “wanton little waifs and serfs.”

This man is talking about children and saying that we are conditioning them not to feed themselves by providing food for them.  He isn’t even talking about High School age children.  While remembering the beginning of a breakfast program at his middle school, Limbaugh said this, “I remember when it started.  I remember the school making a big announcement over the PA.  And I’m not lying to you when I said, ‘What the hell is this? What is this? I eat breakfast at home.  What is this?’  How lucky he was that he ate breakfast at home.  Not everyone did.  Not everyone does.  He should be ashamed of himself.  He should also be grateful to his parents.  Instead, he acts as if he was the one working and paying for that breakfast he ate before he went off to the 7^th grade.

He went on to describe the offered breakfast, “It was like a Continental.   It was nothing hot.  It was rolls and butter and stuff like that.  Then he continued complaining, “Then of course it expanded.  Now we learn it includes dinner in Memphis and other places during the school year.”

I am continually amazed that he has so many people who believe what he says and act as if every word he speaks is the gospel.   I wish this video would go viral and some of the 99% of us would wake up.  Unfortunately, there are about 30% of us that continue to think that it’s going to trickle down any day now. Those are the people that continue to listen to him spout his nonsense and he continues to make millions and millions each year because of it.  Then he uses his money and media access to rage against poor people.

On the other end of the spectrum is my mother.  She organized and runs a backpack program for the children in her community.  She just started it this school year and is already dreaming of expanding it to the middle school.  She works hard to get donations from places like the Elks Club and the local grocery stores, etc. to pay for the food.  Sometimes she buys it herself.  She has ten volunteers and together they pack the backpacks each week with enough food to feed the children (and their siblings if they have them) through the weekend.  She is worried what they will eat over the winter break and Rush Limbaugh doesn’t want children to eat all summer.

My mother receives a VERY SMALL pension, yet she cares for her community.  She puts on a Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner each year at the Elks Club for hundreds of people who have nowhere else to go or not enough money to make a holiday meal for themselves or their families.  She has been doing this for four years now.  She works all year at her local food bank.  She does everything she can to care for the needy around her.  This is the example I had.  I feel sorry for the people who live with Rush Limbaugh as their example.  Oh, did I tell you that my mother also has MS?

Rush Limbaugh is an able bodied, wealthy man who could do so much to help society if he were a kind person, but it is left to people like my Jewish mother to teach us about the spirit of Christmas because even an atheist like me knows that Jesus would have fed the children – and their parents.