DISPATCHES FROM THE RELIGIOUS LEFT: Vegan NYC Mayor Eric Adams tries to force his diet on kids — haven’t they suffered enough?
Eric’s new crusade is giving me some grim flashbacks to my youth. In a mostly-Catholic town in Massachusetts, we were subjected to meatless Fridays in schools for 12 years because God. Non-believers, Jews, and even anyone who went to church every Sunday of his life but didn’t think Jesus actually cared if you had spaghetti and meatballs was forced to go along with this lunch-lady theocracy. Church and state, Mapleshade Elementary! You’re lucky I didn’t know about the Supreme Court when I was wearing a Mork and Mindy T-shirt.
Mostly those hideous Fridays meant an offer of cheese pizza, which was boring and tasteless. But at least it had cheese! Vegan pizza, otherwise known as “toast,” sounds like a euphemism for the child-hating bread-based lunch at a Victorian orphanage. If the kids across this city start busting out spontaneous song-and-dance numbers about child starvation, don’t say nobody warned you. Delete the B from the kids’ BLT and there’s no telling how many Sixties show tunes you might be subjected to.
More to the point, it’s becoming an increasingly disturbing characteristic of the prog army that any derivation of “live and let live” must die. Lefties won’t even go along with “eat and let eat.” Dining options are closely tied to faith and self-definition, and this country is kind of famous for allowing people to define themselves. Even if you define yourself as a joy-rejecting, bark-munching, grass-snarfing, Holy Church of Joaquin Phoenix cheesophobic freak. This is supposed to be the country where you do your own religion, and I pray for bacon-double-cheeseburger.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)