Letters

It is presumed that Lori Tutt was operating on a full stomach when she wrote her disgusting letter [“No Free Breakfast,” Letters, July 18] and simultaneously submitted it for publication last week. Hungry people generally can’t muster the energy.

Ms. Tutt comes out swinging against a grant given to the Southampton School District to provide free breakfasts for all children. This, she claims from the abyss of her ignorance, is SOCIALISM.

The grant to provide free breakfast for “all” ensures that no kid stands out as being needy and hungry—and The Press editorial rightly lauds it [“Gold Stars And Dunce Caps,” Editorial, July 18].

Ms. Tutt is not having it. She sees the inherent evil in it, and seeks to expose its nefarious intent: It is an “antic” of the School Board, which seeks to “further separate children from their families.”

Huh? I must admit that this plunge to the bottomless pit of her venom gave me vertigo. What, for instance, does “further” indicate in that sentence—a trip to a museum?

At this moment in our history—when the conscience and heart of most people are being ripped apart by the daily horror of the real, brute physical separation of thousands of children from their families; their placement in concentration camps at our southern border; and worries about what they are getting to eat, among other basics—her choice of words is barbaric.

It takes a rare form of cruelty, paranoia and feral ignorance to equate a free breakfast for a kid with subversive, ideological “training,” which she calls “normalization.” A free scrambled egg on a bun is “training these easily influenced children and their families to become more dependent on the government,” in her world view. Let them go hungry rather than fall victim to the socialist menu!

Normal for Ms. Tutt is for kids to have “breakfast with their families.” To promulgate this 1950s Ozzie-and-Harriet-Leave-it-to-Beaver-Father-Knows-Best-Lassie-Come-Home-ideal-tv-family mise-en-scène in the 2019 landscape, Ms. Tutt must pressure-wash from her brain the necessities, cares, struggles, timetables and realities of two-job families, let alone families living in poverty who can’t afford food for their children. She also had to delete much of what has been discussed, studied and written about for the past two decades. Easy enough when you are vigilantly fighting SOCIALISM.

She instructs the School Board to return the donation: Hunger is preferable to a socialist Pop-Tart. I suggest she try it (and look up “socialism”) instead of gorging on a feast of Trumpian, fat-filled, junk ideas marinated in hate, and vomiting out poisonous rhetoric.

As the socialist Bertolt Brecht said: “First feed the face, then talk right and wrong!”

Frances GenoveseSouthampton