Free Lunch

It's been a bad day in what is shaping up to be a bad month. I'm doing my best to not rock the boat and make things worse.  Honestly, the best way to have avoided this was to not even go on Facebook (or the internet) at all. This won't happen though. We know it won't. Even still, I'm doing my best to stay clear of articles that are going to piss me off. However, sometimes, well, things just don't go as planned.

Today, I ran across this article by this asshole. This total dicksnot hates the free lunch program for schools. He is horrified at the lesson this is teaching the children of our nation, that there IS such a thing as a free lunch. He thinks the kids should be forced to pay a dime or a nickel or, better yet, he thinks they should SWEEP THE CAFETERIA before they can eat.

Clearly this man, as a child, never had to go hungry.

He never knew what it was like to go to school with nothing on your stomach. He never spent time trying his damnedest to focus because all he could think about was how hungry he was. He never felt the pure, wonderful feeling of having the first meal of the day, some time around noon, and savoring it so much because he knew it was the only meal he would have.

If he would have experienced that, he would understand how fucking horrible he is for begrudging children a free lunch. Being angry that a kid is getting a free lunch due to their poverty is like being angry that someone poured water on someone while they were on fire........and didn't charge them for it. That free lunch is a very small drop in the bucket of the many things that are going very wrong in their lives, things that are out of their control and nothing they can be blamed for.

But he is blaming them.

In fact, be believes the best way to teach them a lesson is to poorshame them. Because, let's face it, having the poor kids sweep the school before they eat is, IN NO WAY, going to cause them to be treated worse by the rest of the kids. Nope, not at all. I'm rolling my eyes right now.

I guess what he doesn't get is that, honestly, all of us poor kids understood all too well that there was no such thing as a free lunch. From the first day that the cafeteria workers gave us that LOOK as we were stamped in differently than the other kids, we have known. When we heard the snickering from the other kids, we certainly knew that this lunch had a price.

Rest assured, we paid. We paid in the looks from the kids with money. We paid in the currency of our social standing and position within our class, a price far higher than any lunch we could have received. We paid in the dismissive tone of our teachers, in the whispers, in how we were ignored. We paid in the raised eyebrows we would receive when we brought toys to class. Any toy deemed poor was laughed at. Any toy deemed too rich for the likes of us was called in to question. Did we steal it? Did our parents pay for it instead of being more responsible with their money?

When I was a freshman, I spent part of the year in a new school. It was a horrible time for me. I was away from my friends. I was living with my mother and her latest awful husband. I was a fat, poor girl which gave me so very little social currency that I just barely functioned. Of course, I was on the free lunch program. You know what I did during my lunch hour?

I hid in the bathroom. I would walk from my class before into the bathroom and I would hide there, starving, while everyone else ate their lunch. I never had breakfast and now I didn't eat lunch. My bus ride home was a good two hours, so it was usually 5:30 to almost six before I would eat anything. This probably did horrible things to my body and how it should function. It certainly didn't help me to lose weight because I was constantly in starvation mode. Yet still, I never once went to collect that free lunch....but as you can see, I still very much paid for it.

Oh and yay! Now this evil old bastard is making these kids pay for their lunch in a whole new way. Now, whenever any of them read about him, even if it's been years after they were in school, they will dredge up all these feelings about the lunch program and what it was like for them. They'll pay all over again.