Rewarded by one’s own action.

When I was growing up poor in the ghettos of North Highlands in California, I didn’t exactly know I was poor. I was aware we were on food stamps. My mother sewed us our clothes. We ate from the Food Bank. Never indulged in fancy Huxtables treats such as fruit juices or sherbert ice cream. When you eat from the Food Bank, you get the staple loaf of Iron Kids bread, canned apple juice, canned green beans, and if you’re lucky at Christmas you might even get a fruit cake (we didn’t know what the hell it was).

We breezed through elementary school like a wallflower (I guess that’s the proper label for myself now). Other kids brought their own lunches. Some of them paid for theirs with allowance money, actual cash in the pocket. Because cash was a big responsibility (or wasn’t even a matter at that age). And every once in a while, the entire school would throw some kind of get-together and have a food drive. Everyone else just seemed so jolly. Everyone except a select few students. At least all the southeast Asian students were on welfare. The lone black girl, her family was definitely on welfare. Those trashy white girls that looked like they always have lice and dirt on their faces. The very quiet Mexican kid. And the white kid with the freckles that got beat by his farmer dad.

When you’re a kid, you look around and there are balloons and ribbons and big smiles on all the grown ups and you have no idea what’s so damn fun. It turns out, if we collected enough food items for the Food Drive, we would get some kind of incentive or accolade for being “the best dang charitable class” of our elementary school. And that was all that mattered. Right?

I was really stupid then.

See, early on, I didn’t realize that there was a rat race. We were like a classroom from Ender’s Game. I’d watch as some students kiss ass, especially some of my fellow poor classmates pretend to be charitable. When you see a 3rd grader get indignified when questioned about whether or not he can contribute to the Food Drive, that’s some messed up stuff. This is very early stuff. Some of them bring it in with pride because they can afford it. Some have to do a double-take at what others are bringing. One of my best friends, who also happened to be dirt poor, asked me why we should even contribute? In the end, we each brought a can of something in. Turns out we forced our moms to take us to the grocery store just to get it, paying full price. Remember, we were all on food stamps.

Okay, here’s the kicker to draw the story full circle and drive my point home. Because we were so ashamed by not being able to provide charity to the Food Drive, we felt peer-pressured into actually taking action to save face. I’m sure our teacher saw how awkward it must have been for the poor students to contribute to the Food Drive, and you could see it in her face, but she never brought it up. Maybe she mentioned sometime that we “didn’t have to bring anything”. And she emphasized only that select group of kids that I happened to belong to. See, now, these little things become incredibly clear in retrospect.

Anyway, long story short. So as to not make us feel ashamed, we were guilt-ridden into bring canned goods to the Food Drive, to feel like we were part of the class. Every dirty, poor, black-sooted one of us. Turns out, we didn’t win anyway. And those “other” kids were mad as hell. Who knew if they held resentment at us? Surely, one of those kids had his father bring in TWO boxes of goods. His face was bright pink and proud. Don’t matter, we lost.

Sure enough, when we went to the food bank that weekend and received our rations (because that’s how it’s done at the food bank, they collect all the donations and divvy it up by nutrition as best they can per family) and looky what we get? I’ll be damn! There’s that same can of green beans I donated to my class room! What are the bleeping odds? Of all the families in this giant rat’s dump town in California, what are the odds this same can of beans made it back into our family’s home?

And do you want to know how we know it was ours? My incredibly juvenile brother marked his initials on it just to see if it would make it’s way back (or did I do it?)

So the irony of the whole thing was we had spent more effort patronizing “the poor/ourselves” by donating and doing the whole superficial grip-and-grin when we could afford it all along. But that’s not what’s sad. It’s sadder when you don’t realize it, that you couldn’t help yourself and that people pitied you for being poor and that you didn’t know they pitied you, and that you didn’t know you were poor. See? That’s some fucked up shit right there.

And this is why some people remain the same and never realize it. And it goes on for generation, after generation, after generation.

And all it took was something simple like a can of green beans to make me realize something wasn’t right. And I woke up.