The Evil of Two Lessers

          It is not unusual to be a hungry child. You can find hungry children easily, all over the world. If you're an American, no matter where you live, you can find a hungry child a short drive from your home--or on your doorstep. The New York Times reports that 22 percent of American children live in poverty. That's a little more than one out of five. So I emphasize, if you're curious about them, they're easy to find.

          Twenty-two percent, one out of five--just numbers. To make it more vivid: When you think poverty, think hunger. For make no mistake, poverty is hunger. Even American poverty. Not the kind of scarecrow hunger you see in news footage from Africa, but a constant, dull, gnawing, often slightly dizzying, always very tiring sensation, because there's never quite enough food, and what there is doesn't come dependably, and is usually not very prime. You eat it, but it doesn't really feed you.

          There's something inside you wanting, wanting. The overwhelming sadness of that wanting is the air you breathe. You want food, you want cleanliness, you want to be protected. You can't articulate all you want, except for the food. You are a little engine of wanting, it's so much a part of you that you don't even call it wanting, it's simply what comes out of your heart all the time, and it's what comes out of your eyes, it's how you see the world.

          At night you toss and turn with this, your nerves are not just frayed, but quite literally starved, and you're jittery, so it's hard to get to sleep. You wake often in a sweat--they're liver-sweats, the kind alcoholics get, but you get them because your liver has little to process but toxins. You're a kid so you don't know this, you're just sweaty and scared. You finally don't sleep so much as pass out. When the alarm rings in the morning it's difficult to open your eyes, to function. Constant, low-grade hunger has its own kind of hangover. What really wakes you up is the tension in the apartment.

          For of course you're living under tremendous pressures, in cramped and dirty quarters--dirty not because your mother doesn't keep a clean place, but because the building is so old, ratty, and roach-infested that only a fire could really clean it. It's certainly too much of a task for a mother who is working as hard as she can, pushed beyond her limits, always nervous, always afraid. Nothing makes her more afraid than looking at her children, because children are not angels, children want and are very insistent about what they want, and she has nothing or next to nothing to give them. And what is more frightening to children than to see the constant, exhausted fear in a parent's eyes? The only good thing about the fear you face in the morning is that it finally wakes you up.

          If your mother is like mine, she has seen to it that you've done your homework and on good nights, you've even been read to. She expects you to go to school and you go. But you're always a little sick. You catch anything going around, because you've nothing to fight it with. You're living on nervous energy, after all, so even your vitality is eating you alive. Again, if your mother is like mine, she tries to teach you some sort of values, but the values you need to survive in the street go against all she's tried to teach. If you're a good kid, you try to juggle both. You try to be kind and tough. You try to remember what Jesus said but, if you're resourceful (as I was), you also steal food. Actually, it's not food you're stealing; it's sweets. Any nutritionist can testify that people deficient in protein feel a lust for sweets. And sweets are easier to steal than protein, and they don't need to be cooked. So you drive the local markets crazy stealing all the sweets you can get your hands on. It doesn't make you any less hungry, except briefly; in fact, the sugar high, on an empty stomach, makes you a bit crazy.