The tickets were a different color. That’s what I remember about being on the free and reduced lunch program after my parents got divorced and we tried to make it as a single income family. The tickets were a different color so every kid knew that you were poor. There was great shame that came with handing that ticket to the lunch lady. But that shame didn’t overwrite my hunger, so I handed it to her and I ate.

This past week, Betsy DeVos made the comment that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And that is technically true. Lunches, even lunches that come free to children in our nation’s schools, cost someone money. I, personally, don’t mind paying taxes to help make sure that children don’t go hungry.

Here’s the thing about children. They are our most vulnerable population. They are developing and forming and every thing that happens to and around them affects them. Hunger. Poverty. It affects them. And because it affects them, it affects all of us.

I am a Christian and since this is a Sunday, let me turn now to the Bible. Once there was a man named Jesus who stood before a large crowd and he was going to deliver what we would call today a sermon. He was teaching them. But he looked out among them and saw that they were hungry and he understood they would not be able to listen and learn while their bellies rumbled with hunger pains, so he fed them. This is the Sermon on the Mount. The feeding of the multitude. The story of when a man named Jesus took some loaves and fishes and fed thousands of hungry people so that he could teach them.

We can argue about the best ways to feed starving children. But there are hungry kids sitting in our public schools – current statistics indicate 1 in 5 of every kid – and they already have a lunch time and a lunch program, so free and reduced lunches make sense. It’s a distribution program in place that works.

There has been a lot of talk since the election about rural poverty. No one, they claim, cares about poor rural people and that is why we are here. Ironically, cutting school lunch programs would dramatically hurt those living in rural poverty. I know, because I work in an area with high amounts of rural poverty. In fact, I recently did a long series of Tweets about what is was like working with these teens. I share that story with you here because it seems relevant to this conversation we keep having.

It’s true, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone, somewhere is paying for that lunch. But I’m not in the business of punishing children, affecting their health and development, and compromising our future for some negative ideology that overlooks the very real causes of poverty and puts more money into the hands of rich people while children sit hungry in the classroom and can’t focus on learning because their teacher’s voice isn’t louder than the growling in their bellies. I’d rather my taxes go to feed hungry children then pay for our billionaire president’s many vacations or to increase our capacity to kill the world a thousand times over by developing more nuclear weapons. Investing in children is an investment in America.

This is what it's like working with teens living in rural poverty in a small Midwestern town//


Filed under: Poverty, Sunday Reflections