Reproduced with permission from the author, Lee Bullard. She is a friend of mine. I cried when I first read it. No American child needs to know this humiliation: I recall a story from when I was in middle school about free lunches. When you first attend school, they pass out a piece of paper that your parents have to fill out to receive free lunches. This paperwork takes awhile to go through, so your first month of free lunches is never free unless youve filled out the paperwork the year before. I was unaware of this and tried to go through the lunch line at school before my paperwork was sent through. After my plate had already been filled up, the lunch lady stopped me and told me I wasnt in the computer yet, so Id have to pay $1.75. Now, $1.75 may not seem like a lot, but not a lot of people know the real meaning of poor, either. I lived in a household that had exactly $0 income. My mother had disabilities that kept her from working and my stepfather was a deadbeat who did carpentry work. Instead of working full time, hed work just enough to get by and then sit on his ass the rest of the time. $1.75 was two cheap, Wal-Mart brand sodas in our household. A loaf of bread. A pack of cheap, sliced cheese. Two cans of soup. You get the idea. Needless to say, when you need these things that feed more than one person, it seems highly silly to pay $1.75 for a meal that feeds one person for 1/3 of the day. In fact, I would save all the nickels and pennies I could find in the bottom of the washer as a child and when I finally reached $3.5 (usually after a month or two), I would treat myself by walking two miles to the store and buying a cream soda and an ice cream. Anyways, I remember just being really hungry on this day and really wanting something to eat, but the lunch lady took my tray and threw it in the trash (because I had already touched it). Let me repeat that. She took a meal that no one else could eat because I had touched it...and threw it away because I could not pay for it. She then handed me a peanut butter sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. More than anything, I hated peanut butter as a child. I absolutely hated it. I took my sandwich to the table and sat down with it and I stared at it for the longest time. Then I cried while I ate it. I felt so ridiculously stupid and greedy for wanting what everyone else had on their tray. I could care less if it was from home or if it was from a school. I just wanted the option of it not being peanut butter and I felt angry that they couldnt have just given me food they were going to throw away anyways. To make matters worse, a drink wasnt offered with this meal, so my mouth became unbearably dry, making me feel hungrier. A lot of people might think, Well, you got a sandwich. If you were really poor, you wouldnt care what you got, youd just be happy you got it. That is not how a poor child thinks. Especially not a poor child sitting in a crowd of people who are all eating a meal that looks ten times better than their own. I hate when people say this because its like saying poor children arent allowed to have emotions like jealousy, envy, or disdain. When in reality, poor children feel this way more than middle-class. We dont understand our social status. The only thing we can think is, Why do they get to eat a four-item meal and Im stuck with this? Does this mean Im not good enough? So, to add to this article, as a child that did without. Children who are actually hungry dont care that their meal comes from a cafeteria. We dont care that children may have come to school with brown bags or that other children got their meals from the lunch lady. We just want to be treated the same. Id rather not be handed a sandwich at all because I felt like I stuck out in a crowd of people and it screamed, Look at me, Im poor. Make fun of me. Go ahead. I know that some will rail regarding my qualification that no American child should know this: THIS IS AMERICA. WE ARE TAUGHT THAT WE ARE THE RICHEST COUNTRY ON THE PLANET. WHY ARE OUR CHILDREN SUBJECTED TO THIS BULLSHIT? I know there are starving children in Somalia. They would be happy for a PB sandwich. A child in Somalia is a child from a nation where the basic staples of survival are a goal to be reached. In Somalia, survival is different. I still lament that children starve there, and I rejoice when they are fed. They have a different standard dependent upon their circumstances. America is not Somalia. America is a country not torn by anarchy and pirates. Even with the ills our society faces, we *should* be capable of feeding a child in a culturally equitable manner. I know this puts me in the camp of shoulds but this is an issue of mercy. Mercy wins over shoulds.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 03:49:07 +0000
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