WE'VE LOST THE LITTLE RED HEN
My son Jack is two and a half years old.
Exactly.
Today is his half-birthday.
And he's quite a guy. He's funny, articulate, athletic and, as far as I'm concerned, sharp as a tack.
He's an expert on Thomas trains, can pray (non-memorized) all by himself and he has recently discovered that, when you're a male, urinating is both a pleasant diversion and a test of hand-eye coordination.
In short, he's a normal lad having a great childhood.
Tuesday is library day, Wednesday is park day and on the occasional Friday he goes to the Children's Museum.
It's library day that has me worried.
Not that I'm against books. Not that he doesn't love looking at books and having them read to him. Not that I'm not thrilled the library offers this very useful and excellent program.
But last night he showed me one of his books.
“The Little Red Hen.”
I was thrilled. I'm a huge fan of “The Little Red Hen.” When I get to heaven with Ronald Reagan, we're going to sit around and read “The Little Red Hen.” For more than a year I've had a copy at work to refer to every now and then.
Are you familiar with the story?
There is this hen. She is little and red. And she finds a grain of wheat. Being a thrifty and prudent hen, she decides to plant the grain of wheat and harvest it. As she sets out on this task, she asks various of the hangers on in her world if they will help her.
They tell her to screw off.
Er, I mean, they politely decline her invitation.
So she plows and plants by herself, and waters and cultivates and ultimately harvests and cleans. Then she decides to grind the wheat she has grown into flour and make bread.
Again, she asks the various gold bricks lounging about if they can assist her in any of these tasks.
And they all refuse. They are too busy, they have other things to do, they can't be bothered. That puts all the responsibility on the little red hen, who has been able to count only on herself to do the labor needful to make her bread. She makes the bread and the various creatures who declined to help her sit around and watch Judge Judy all day.
Then, the bread is done. It smells good, it no doubt tastes good, and it's probably full of bowel-cleansing natural fiber. Not surprisingly, her WIC-client friends express an interest in the bread. They each in turn volunteer to help her eat the bread. They couldn't help make it, but they sure as heck are eager to help her eat it.
But she says no.
If you don't produce, you don't consume. If you can't work to provide your bread, you don't get any bread.
I love it. It's such a true and rational principle. If you don't work, you don't eat. By the sweat of their brow they shall eat their bread.
The little red hen is my hero, and “The Little Red Hen” is one of my favorite pieces of literature. So I was excited last night to see that Jack had brought “The Little Red Hen” home with him from the library.
Except it looked different.
There was a subtitle.
“The Little Red Hen Makes A Pizza.”
That's curious.
It's also communist. It turns out the “red” in the New Age little red hen refers to her politics. And, if a quick saunter through the Internet last night was any indication, a lot of folks in our libraries and schools hate the old hen and love the new.
Hate the old? Yes. Education reviews say the story shows the hen as the bad guy, as some bitter old biddy intent on revenge. The sloth and greed and covetousness of her neighbors is nowhere understood or mentioned, much less criticized. They are victims of her selfishness.
Love the new? Yes. Let me explain why.
See, the new little red hen makes a pizza, but she does so in a consumer society, nor a producer society. Instead of making what she needs, she is on her way off to various stores to buy what she needs to make her pizza. And though all the welfare cheats around her refuse to assist her in any way, once her pizza is completed she says that it is more than she needs and immediately offers it to her idle neighbors. They, it is hinted, later help her with clean up.
What they've done is taken the little red hen and run the poor girl through sensitivity training. Instead of being a lesson on work, productivity, self-reliance and the evils of welfare, the new little red hen is about the “moral obligation to share.”
The laziness of the idlers is not criticized, their sense of entitlement is not challenged, they are not the ones who need to learn a lesson. Rather, the one who needs to be enlightened by the experience is she who has worked while others have lounged. She doesn't need as much as she has, the new book shows, and her obligation is to give what she has produced to those who would not help produce it.
It's like little-communist school. It's as if the Biblical “by the sweat of your brow” has been replaced by the Marxist “to each according to his needs.” Productivity is penalized, property is purloined, principle is perverted.
This is like taxpayer training. Brain wash them young. Teach them that they are producers required to carry the drones of society on their backs. Subvert their culture, destroy their society, pollute their young brains.
And this book was written for schools and libraries. It was meant to be a textbook for the new culture, an exercise in social engineering conducted at taxpayer expense.
On my child and yours.
My son Jack is two and a half years old.
And they're already trying to turn him into a tax-slave zombie of the welfare state.
The old hen was a parable of responsibility – which is no doubt why they killed her. The new hen is a role model for the socialist left – which is no doubt why she's in the library.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2007
