About Damn Time

I make jokes about my childhood to my class. Jokes that I think belong in the past. Jokes about being the kid with the boring lunchbox, the one with two slices of brown bread with nothing but cold margarine on them.

There was a space between the slices where a redder-than-red tomato slice and the thickest pastrami slice this side of a butchery should have been. That space, instead, was filled with shame and envy, and solidarity with all the other kids who also didn’t have lunch worth sharing.

I joke about the five kilogram tin of mixed fruit jam that never seems to end. (I think we still have jam from Grade 9!) I joke about the Romany Creams that are only for Friday tea, and the nice plates that are only for guests.

I kid about having fake Iverson sneakers, about coming late to basketball matches because taxi drivers did not care whether I made it to the starting line-up or not. I joke about being the last kid to be picked up because my parents had to work long hours.

It is all funny. It really is. Not growing up with money bequeaths you a strange sense of humour, the kind that permits you to laugh at your pain when it is safely in the past.

My pupils and I laugh at it all. Because I am their teacher and it makes them happy to see that we have things in common. Because, well, we understand our circumstances. Growing up not having is our thing.

But we do not laugh long once we think about why we still do not have.

It is one thing to giggle at the past but another to chuckle at the present. Today is much too close. The anxieties of not having all the resources it takes to make a meaningful or dignified life are always too near and too real.

We also do not laugh once we realise that my childhood was a long time ago, but that theirs is still unfolding, and that they face exactly the same economic circumstances I did in the so-called past. It is scary, at first, realising how close the past is. Then it is frustrating. Then it makes us angry.

I am asked why things are the way they are. I am asked for answers. I am asked for solutions.

I have none. If I did, I would have sorted out all the problems a long time ago. (Starting with The Stolen Land.)

But it always occurs to me that someone does have the answers and the solution, that these people control our lives, and that it is to these people that such questions need to be put.

So… if some people are the recipients of highly descriptive complaints from certain members of the youth, I can neither deny nor confirm my role in their writing.

All I can say is this: It is about damn time.

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