Classy Dame: NOW Secretary Dons Bread Bags to Mock Joni Ernst

Classy Dame: NOW Secretary Dons Bread Bags to Mock Joni Ernst

Classy Dame:  NOW Secretary Dons Bread Bags to Mock Joni Ernst

Leave it to the feministas at the National Organization for Women: they sure engage in some classy humor.

You’ll recall that in her response to the State of the Union address, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst related a memory of growing up in rural Iowa:

“You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry. But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet.”

Well, the secretary of the Florida chapter of NOW found that little anecdote just HILARIOUS! A real knee slapper! Those Iowa rubes! Bread bags on kids’ feet — how uncool is that!

So this singularly unattractive woman decided to don some bread bags of her own just for mockery and giggles.

Not everyone took the cheap shot. Peggy Noonan, writing in a more thoughtful frame of mind, noted that the use of bread bags as shoe coverings is from not-so-long-ago:

“I liked what Ernst said because it was real. And it reminded me of the old days.

There are a lot of Americans, and most of them seem to be on social media, who do not know some essentials about their country, but this is the way it was in America once, only 40 and 50 years ago:

America had less then. Americans had less.”

I can certainly attest to the use of bread bags as foot covering, only in a little different form.

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Not sure, but they may have bread bags under their boots.

See the kids in the picture? I’m not in that picture, but I could’ve been in one similar to that. It’s from the Chicago blizzard of 1967, and as a kid growing up in a small town in northwest Indiana I remember that same blizzard impacting us, too. Like Joni Ernst, I grew up with plenty of snow and bone-chilling temperatures.

We didn’t have UGGS then. No über-insulated boots from REI or LL Bean. We had what were called galoshes — rubber boots that went on over the shoes. My mother, always worried that overexposure to wet snow would bring on illness, would wrap our shoes (“play shoes,” mind you, not our “good” shoes) in bread bags before we put on our boots. They really did the trick; our feet stayed dry even if the snow was deep and went over the tops of our boots.

We weren’t poor. My father had a stable job with a large company, so we were comfortably middle class. Yet frugality for my family, as it was for Ernst’s, was the watchword for our lives. My parents were children of the Depression — my mother’s immigrant family being especially impacted — and purchasing frivolous items like fancy boots or multiple pairs of shoes for children who would just outgrow them wasn’t practical. The hard times of her childhood was something my mother was never, ever able to release; when she passed away at 88 years of age in 2012, she was buried in her favorite grey suit — one she had bought on sale at a favorite department store.

So while the NOW secretary thought she was merely mocking Joni Ernst, she was ridiculing all the rest of us who grew up with less than what the average child has now. I would say, however, that I grew up with more substance than she would ever appreciate:  I grew up in a reverent, two-parent home where I learned responsibility, faith, patriotism, integrity, and respect for life. I’ll bet that NOW secretary would scoff at those too.

But you know what could bring a chuckle? Seeing that Florida NOW gal spend a winter in my hometown using those designer pink tennis shoes worn by her heroine Wendy Davis as her sole footwear. She’d be begging for bread bags.

 

Written by

Kim is a pint-sized patriot who packs some big contradictions. She is a Baby Boomer who never became a hippie, an active Republican who first registered as a Democrat (okay, it was to help a sorority sister's father in his run for sheriff), and a devout Lutheran who practices yoga. Growing up in small-town Indiana, now living in the Kansas City metro, Kim is a conservative Midwestern gal whose heart is also in the Seattle area, where her eldest daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live. Kim is a working speech pathologist who left school system employment behind to subcontract to an agency, and has never looked back. She describes her conservatism as falling in the mold of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles. Don't know what they are? Google them!

9 Comments
  • Penny says:

    My family was straight up middle class, we didn’t waste the money we had on frivolous stuff. I had play shoes, school shoes and Sunday church shoes, when I got into jr. high, I got gym shoes for gym class…it was the same through high school. My mom, and I, sewed much of our clothes….my mom made great skirts and slacks out of my dad’s suit and dress slacks for me. I dressed very well!!

    Personally, I am so sick&tired of these ignorant, vacuous, intellectual midgets. They just do not realize that they are actually in the minority, and I pity them if they really had a childhood where their parents did not teach them the value of using their resources wisely. But then, all we have to do is look at the current administration and its worshippers to see that so many have become wasteful, irresponsible, spendthrifts with such disastrous results for their personal lives and our country.

  • Tim says:

    NOW is catching up to Stalin in the mass murder category. I sure wouldn’t want to go to the pearly gates and have to explain why I aided these killers.

  • Xavier says:

    They demand we recycle then mock us for it.
    The hypocrisy of Progressivism has no bounds.

  • Claire Stevens says:

    Liberals are all about consuming: people, products, religion. If you aren’t consuming (buying) then you are a heretic and must be publicly shamed. For a liberal the worst thing that could happen is to be publicly shamed. It’s all about appearances for them.

    When you’re a liberal the only time it is acceptable to make things is when it is called “DIY” and is featured prominently on a blog so that others may comment on the creativity and artistic ability of the blogger. It’s not about the moral value of frugality but the elevation of the self.

    Liberals celebrate the self and for them the ego is god.

  • Dana says:

    Apparently, the NOW bag-lady didn’t do anything radical like grow up poor. Joni Ernst grew up poor, and so did I: our parents did for us what they had to do for us to enable the family to survive on what we did have.

  • Linda says:

    Gee, I didn’t realize I was poor white trash because I, too, wore bread bags inside my boots as a kid in Oregon so my feet would stay dry. We never got a lot of snow accumulation where I lived, and it would not have made sense back in the ’60s to buy winter boots for kids whose feet were rapidly growing (my sister went through three shoe size changes one summer). My dad had an engineering degree, and my mom had one in home economics and art. But I guess because my mom was practical, this woman from NOW can sneer at us.

  • Rick Caird says:

    An unattractive woman makes herself even more unattractive both intellectually and physically. Yea for her, a twofer.

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