Various Misdemeanors
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When they first arrived I wondered why it was that this group of black teenagers had decided to spend their day volunteering at a food bank. But then as we got to talking it became clear they were all doing court-ordered community service for various misdemeanors. One of them broke a window in an abandoned building. Another stole some candy. A third got into a fist fight. You know, stuff that teenage males do when bored. They were curious what I was in for. I told them I was just volunteering.
They all kind of looked at each other, confused.
After an awkward silence the youngest one spoke up. He seemed to be the extrovert.
“Wait… You mean no one made you come here? You just came to do this, for free?” he asked, holding a soggy zucchini like a flaccid exclamation point.
“Yup”, I replied.
I was getting another look at the system I was protesting, except this time it was by accident.
I realized that I probably should have been sentenced to do exactly what I was doing for my earlier disorderly conduct violation. But I had inadvertently sentenced myself in spite of my privilege. I didn’t feel good about this, I felt stupid. It was one thing to do something positive while also vigorously resisting capitalism. It was another thing to spend my free time doing what the state required as punishment in a system which was obviously designed to ensnare black lives, but for no reason at all.
After a while we finished bagging up the good zucchinis. As I was getting ready to leave I was recording something in my Palm Pilot and one of the other kids asked me about it. I showed him how I could write with the stylus. Then he asked me where I got it.
That’s when the youngest one jumped in again, “HEEEE bought it with HIIIS M-O-N-E-Y, WHAD-JA-THINK?”
He sounded exactly like those irritating kids with conservative parents who thought that poverty was a simple matter of people not working hard enough.
But the other kids nodded in agreement with him, like he had said something profound.
Why weren’t they full of Rage Against the Machine like me?
What he said wasn’t even true. Dad won that Palm Pilot in a raffle at an IT conference and he gave it to me.
But for some reason I didn’t tell them that.
