Lawyers Brains Get Cold
Lawyers at an Auckland firm conducted their business in bare feet yesterday, raising enough money to provide 250 children with shoes. The legal team at Lowndes Jordan were sponsored by friends and relatives to wear office clothes, but without footwear. Apart from the $5000 raised, partner Rick Shera said his firm wanted to highlight the fact that thousands of children went to school each day without shoes. "We can't imagine what it would be like for these kids to go to school, particularly on cold and wet days, wearing no shoes."
Where are children in New Zealand going to school without shoes? What utter nonsense. If they have no shoes it's because the dumb little tykes lost them on the way to school or their parents toked up their social welfare benefit. Social welfare covers situations like this already so I refuse to accept there is in New Zealand's welfare system a child who genuinely has parents too poor to afford a pair of shoes.
Quit the local grandstanding and focus on genuinely needy children overseas who have never had a pair of shoes in their life if you wish to exercise this silly social conscience.
And in a time of swine flu and winter colds, how responsible is it to encourage workers to walk around in the office barefoot? Bloody stupid.
Where are children in New Zealand going to school without shoes? What utter nonsense. If they have no shoes it's because the dumb little tykes lost them on the way to school or their parents toked up their social welfare benefit. Social welfare covers situations like this already so I refuse to accept there is in New Zealand's welfare system a child who genuinely has parents too poor to afford a pair of shoes.
Quit the local grandstanding and focus on genuinely needy children overseas who have never had a pair of shoes in their life if you wish to exercise this silly social conscience.
And in a time of swine flu and winter colds, how responsible is it to encourage workers to walk around in the office barefoot? Bloody stupid.
posted by Cactus Kate at 6:42 AM
19 Comments:
How odd. My daughter goes to a decile 9 country state primary school where shoes are optional. 80% of the kids getting dropped off from mummy's Rangerover or Volvo wagon are shoeless...by choice even in the recent frost, just like in my primary school days 35 years ago.
They'd be better off donating legal services to local schools than this crap.
Heh, I was twelve and first year boarding school before I had to wear shoes.. got bloody awful blisters too.
And history repeated..
Our son spent most of his primary days in barefeet because he kept taking his shoes off and getting them pinched.
I wont mention his name, because he's a respectable man these days, but many years ago my wife was up in the foothills of the Ruahines doing a horse deal
The two year old son of the farmer had pooped himself and was moaning about his dirty bum.. so the father picked him up in a sitting position and scrubbed his arse backward and forward on some frosty grass to clean him up!
In other words, hardship is a relative thing.. what seems awful to a lawyer in a heated office is either a preference or practical thing to a significant slice of the population.. rich and poor.
Its always amusing.. you knew these snotty nosed little brats, barefeet, sniffing all the time, in rags, loud and uncouth parents, but a decade or two later they are in suits :)
Yep, "Once Were Brats", but like poverty it's usually a transient state. Research in the US some years ago showed that you had a near permanent group of people in poverty.. but something like 90% of the people within the group changed as they moved up the food chain.
People worry about poverty too much, they worry about the externalities of it and neglect the poverty of mind that will occur if they don't teach well and do the discipline on the spot.
There's a kid down the road who is tiny and looks like Nia Glassie.. always bullied, so her mum sends her to a country school.. no more bullying because the teachers are country types and sort that shit out. Now the only bullying is on the bus with the town kids.. and the parents of the bullies have got letters.. it'll be sorted. There's an awful lot of barefeet and cowshit at that school, but the kids are learning regardless of how they look and what they wear. End of lesson.
JC
And at least the top 20 at the firm can cut a $5k cheque EACH and not even notice it in monthly outgoings.
So they got FRIENDS to cough up money instead? For a TOTAL of $5k?
I'm with you - wankers.
With that sort of behaviour I think I now understand why New Zealand is unable to find befitting leaders in central and local government
No offence to the blog owner but I just can't imagine lawyers doing anything for charity. LJ must have been guilted into it.
You are of course completely right about Social Welfare and cash for shoes etc.
The worst of it is that TV3 will be hosting a bloody Telethon in a few weeks to raise money for exactly this purpose!!
Its nauseating that we will be forced to feel guilty when the taxes we pay are sitting down at the local SW office to pay the fucktards who can't seem capable of clothing and feeding their children.
to quote a very funny You Tube clip about the death of Jacko... it makes me want to puke my mustache off!!
As an ex-solo parent, I agree with you. Mine never went to school without shoes. I just wished they'd eaten their bloody lunches, and as they got older, eaten breakfast, too.
- TripeWryter
Hell, I never wore shes at all until I was nine or ten. The soles of our feet turned to leather. It was wonderful. Mind you, winters in the Bay of Islands were never terribly cold. There might have been two or three mild frost each year, gone by nine o'clock.
Of course, global cooling probably has buggered that all up and now they might get five or six frosts.
It is very 'cool' among primary school kids to not wear shoes or jumpers. It's a pain in the arse to the parents who are trying to keep them warm and healthy. Very few of those children lack shoes because they can't afford them. Lawyers with no shoes - hmmm, interesting.
All the kids at our school have shoes- and kids being kids, it's a mission to get them to keep their shoes on!
Precisely. Compared to the wider world, poverty doesn't exist in NZ. Try telling that to a bleedin' heart trade unionist whose international exposure extends to the Gold Coast!
Where do kids go to school without shoes? In Manukau, south Auckland. See em all the time.
As to why, that's a different question. If CYFS & WINZ were interested (and had staff time), they could just do routine visits to schools to check on which kids don't have shoes. Then visit Mum & Dad and ask why? Poverty - WINZ hand out the shoes. No good reason - parents get done for failing to provide necessities of life...
Give them a break, you can not seriously think that was why they did it. All they want is some populist publicity - given the idea I have no doubt that John Key would have jumped the opportunity. I suspect their clientele since this stunt will now increase - good for them.
bah hahahahahaha
As the reasonably affluent, non beneficiary parent (yes with husband too) of 3 kids, living in the balmy north, there have been and continue to be many times when my high achieving darlings have gone to school with no shoes on. Not for lack of them, not for lack of knowing how to apply them to their feet, indeed often not for the lack of parental nagging but because they WANT TO - how bloody ridiculous the soft liberal left are to assume that the problem has anything to do with poverty.
Actually that shouldnt be liberal left, it should be narrow minded left. In fact wouldnt surprise me if the lovely Sue Kedgley is responsible for such woofterish thinking.
Oh boohoo, I went to school in the 80s and only wore shoes on calf club day or class photos day because mum got sick of me loosing them or getting them wet and muddy. It isn't like these kids spend all day out side in the cold, class rooms are far better insulated and heated now anyway.
With the likes of the warehouse and number 1 shoes, anybody who can't afford shoes for their kids is spending too much on booze or pokies.
In my childhood NZ children went to school barefoot because they wanted to. The worst part about intermediate school for me was that I had to wear shoes. Okay, my feet became a little on the wide side, being left as free as that, but imagine my pleasure when in Milan to find a shoe shop that sold shoes for wide footed people like me. I did not think there would be a market for them amongst the Eyeties.
Barefoot; it's neat, and when your feet get hard enough you can run on most surfaces.
At the local sally shop where a friend of mine volunteers, shoes of which there is about every style/size you could imagine start at $2 per pair (old but in good condition) ranging to $8 per pair (for basically brand new) they do not accept crap and are actually very picky so 80% of the donations go in the bin. They have racks full as do just about every other op shop in the country. I do not accept even someone on the lowest income cannot save up $8 - and the age old excuse , kids grow to fast is ridiculous for the same reason. They dont grow faster than time it takes to get $2 together. Every time i hear about this KidsCan group it annoys me everytime i hear it. So will not be supporting the upcoming telethon for this so called cause when there are so many others more worthy.
I used to often go to school with no shoes, because I took them off the previous lunch time to kick the rugby ball etc and forgot about them.
Cold & frosty winter morning plus sub-tropical warm winter afternoon, plus dopey & forgetful boys used to running around barefoot can combine to create these sorts of tragic conditions.
"I just can't imagine lawyers doing anything for charity. LJ must have been guilted into it."
Not so, Boris. Someone very close to me is a partner in the world's largest law firm & she (and they) support numerous charities, and not just fiscally either.
That's the thing with wealthy folks: the more they've got, the more they have to give.
Socialist pricks hate to hear that, but it's a fact.
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