What's Wrong With Peanut Butter?

Our local television news reported a few days ago that some people have started GoFundMe campaigns to pay for children carrying a negative balance in their school lunch account.  This is a noble effort.  But what shocked me was the explanation that those children are fed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of the hot lunch.  They made it sound like a significant hardship.

The reason I was surprised is that throughout high school, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, not just sometime, all the time – every single day – 720 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  My high school did not have a hot lunch program.  Everyone brought in lunch in a bag, bought something to drink and sat in the combination auditorium, gymnasium and cafeteria (without tables) to eat.  My mother packed the sandwich with a small box of raisins and I bought a carton of milk.  There was not a single time I felt deprived.

I still enjoy peanut butter sandwiches, but today, apparently a peanut butter sandwich for lunch is a tragedy.  Maybe it’s a lack of perspective.

A few years ago I wrote about another local crisis invented by the perspective-challenged.  Children eligible for free school lunch had to depend on a different program in the summer.  A local charity set up a place where the children could meet and receive a free lunch during summer vacation.  The crisis in this case was that they were forced to eat while sitting at picnic tables outside, that is, not in an air-conditioned building.  Perspective might remind us that widely available air conditioning is a very recent convenience.  For thousands of years people survived without it.  Also, some people go on picnics and eat outside in the summertime on purpose!

Finally, on the same day I heard about the peanut butter crisis, our neighborhood website brought another problem.  “There is a cat that's been hit by a car” on one of the neighborhood streets.  “Does anyone know what to do? The kids are going to see it walking to the bus stop.”  Oh, no!  The kids might see a dead cat on the way to school.  One reply suggested that the solution involved a shovel and a garbage bag, but this very sensible advice was rejected as somehow not good enough.  Perhaps it was not showing sufficient respect the to dead cat.  (You can’t make this stuff up.)

When people see that peanut butter and jelly is not good enough for a school lunch, that eating outside is not good enough for a free lunch program and that a shovel and a bag are not good enough for a dead cat (not to mention the potential trauma from seeing a dead cat on the way to school), I conclude that maybe life is not tough enough.  When these kinds of issues creep into the crisis category we perhaps don’t appreciate how good we have it and have lost perspective about what a real crisis looks like.