Run For the Hills!

Retina scanning in the schools? It's madness! I can appreciate the desire to have a cashless system at school, but what about ID cards? When I was in college, my school ID doubled as a debit card, while moonlighting as a library card. The claim that this is being done to destigmatize free-lunchers (heh, I first typed that as "free-munchers") is a little dubious. Kids have been getting free-lunch for decades. Their peers are pretty perceptive; your average fourth-grader can tell who has money and who doesn't without knowing how much they pay for lunch! The concept of having your "eye-print" on file at such a young age frightens me, it really does. I'm trying to recall if I was ever fingerprinted as a child in one of those so-called safety fairs. I'd never get voluntarily printed now. Forget it. It's bad enough that I have to have a Social Security number. Orwell may have been off on the date, but I'm just getting creeped out by all this retina-scanning, gene-mapping, surveillance-happy hoo-hah. Between insidious government intrusion and twelve-year olds in midi tops and belly rings, our society is going to Cleveland in a handbasket. For real, yo.