The Destructiveness of Deprivation and Want
In 1974, I used to troll around my Arizona neighborhood and beat up Cub Scouts regularly.
It wasn’t that I hated the Scouts. I admired them. I wanted to be them. They were a group to which I couldn’t belong because, in order to be a Cub Scout, your mom had to be able to buy you the required uniform. No uniform, no admission to the club. They would gather together in those uniforms and laugh and do activities together. They compared merit badges and were thrilled when someone received a new one.
At the time my mother was working several jobs and had had her only vehicle repossessed by her ex-husband. She wouldn’t allow us to refer to our tiny family of three as poor. We were broke but never poor, she would tell my sister and I. But the sting of exclusion due solely because of our brokeness felt bad. It felt unfair, unjust. This exclusion pissed me off in ways I was unprepared to understand.
So I used to walk around the neighborhood and start fights with Cub Scouts. Sometimes there were a couple together and my unbound rage would still pick the fight and I’d come home beaten but not deterred. More often than not, I’d encounter one of them blithely headed home or to school or to a Cub Scout meeting and just beat the living shit out of this blameless kid whose parents had the cash to shell out for something beyond my reach.
Yeah. I was a bitter little asshole. I allowed, at eight years old, my station in life to determine a path of feeling that life was just so goddamned unfair that I would let my unrestrained anger at those I deemed culpable for the injustice run wild. At the time I was told by school counselors and my beleaguered mother that it was simply unacceptable that I take out my malevolence upon kids with (what I saw as) rich parents. I was told and ultimately taught to channel that anger into bettering my situation, taking responsibility for my station in life, and leaving the other kids alone.
I was taught that those who let poverty and deprivation define them would always feel maligned by life and that there would always be people who had more than I did. Learn to make the most of what you have rather than punish those with more. Poverty was not a liability but merely an obstacle to circumvent and that rage was like taking a hammer to a wall that couldn’t be broken, only climbed over.
As I grew older, I held onto these lessons yet I still had the anger.
By the time I got to seventh grade my sense of injustice became a bit more refined, though it still resembled a bludgeon rather than a scalpel. I found in my tendency to be a genuine smartass to a group of Latino kids who decided the band nerd with the big mouth was deserving of his own beat down. One fall day, when Victor Rodriguez (who was a small seventh grader but who held great influence on a grouping of much larger boys) was terrorizing a couple of other band kids, I crudely made fun of his size.
Later that day, two of his bigger comrades beat me in the hallway and, in a bizarre stereotype of a nerd versus bullies scenario, stuffed me in my locker. I cried for help for twenty minutes until a teacher let me out.
Thus began a months-long campaign between Victor and his allies to find opportunities to beat me up routinely. Every week I came home with another injury and every week my poor mother was furious. She went to the vice principal a number of times to complain but he was already so overloaded with similar situations, mine became just one more skirmish on the pile.
He often explained that Victor came from a broken home and that his mother was working several jobs. His brother was in prison and he was “acting out” as if this all comprised a solid excuse for he and his buddies pummeling me. My mother never explained that she was divorced, also working several jobs, and that I wasn’t beating anyone up (anymore...). I had, apparently, learned some sort of lesson from my days as the Cub Scout Bully and my mom was not in the habit of making excuses for me. She was raised by a man who told her “Even a good excuse is still just a fucking excuse.”
One day, Victor and his gang chased me home from school and I ran into the house. Mom was so angry, she chased the boys away in her nightgown, brandishing a chrome vacuum extender. After, she gave me the metal tube and told me to defend myself.
I kept it in my locker. It was more a reminder that I could use it not that I would. Then, a few weeks later, when Victor stole my science textbook and started ripping pages out of it for fun, I did use it.
Victor’s mother was, of course, furious and explained that he was poor and brown and didn’t deserve to be hit with a pipe. His bullying wasn’t his fault, she snarled. It was society’s. When the vice principal furiously asked my mother what she was going to do about this (holding up a slightly bent chrome tube with a bit of blood on it) my mother defiantly replied “I’m gonna get him another sweeper piece.”
Still years later, as a young middle school teacher, I was positioned in a school on the west side of Chicago surrounded by kids like Victor. The overwhelming stories of fathers, uncles, and brothers in prison, of single mothers working multiple jobs, of clothes handed down for three sets of children were coupled by a split population in response. Most of the kids seemed to do their best at school and in their lives, learning what they could, engaging in the social experiment of American school. Others were just like me when I was terrorizing Cub Scouts except now they were in gangs.
These kids I understood.
I understood the anger and alienation. I understood the feeling of deprivation and want. I understood the desire to punish those who had because they had not and it was all beyond their control. They all knew that beating other kids up was wrong. They knew that shooting rival gang members over territory and pride was stupid. They knew that proliferating a fantasy war with the police was a ticket to nowhere. They knew but they didn’t care. The consequences didn’t matter because they had no sense of their own future.
At the time it was explained to me that these families and these gang members were victims of poverty and racism and my answer was always “So, what are they going to do about that?”
“Dismantle the capitalist, racist system.”
“So, just burn it all down in rage?”
“Yes. It needs to be changed. The system is broken and the only way to fix it is to destroy it and rebuild.”
“But these kids don’t have any rebuilding skills yet. All they know is how to destroy. Who’s going to rebuild it once it’s been burnt to the ground?”
“Oh, I see. You’re a racist.”
I took that particular bait far more often than I’m proud of because by calling me a name the question I’d asked was completely side-stepped. My own prejudices were irrelevant. What was relevant was the answer to my question which few seemed to take seriously: who rebuilds the system once the capitalist, racist patriarchy is unrigged?
Today, I hear angry children (sometimes in the bodies of twenty to forty-year-olds) screaming to punish the wealthy, dismantle the patriarchy, eradicate systemic racism, and discard the history of the creation of, however flawed, the most progressive and prosperous country in human history out of the rage of those deprived and full of want.
These kids I understand.
It took adults with a built-in disdain for excuses to teach me to take responsibility for my own emotional state rather than blame it on Cub Scouts and their expensive uniforms. It took Victor’s mother making excuses for her bully son to teach me that being on the Cub Scout end of things sucked because when confronted with that unhampered malice you can’t see your victim’s story for the fog of your own. It took ten year’s of seventh and eighth grade gang members to teach me how cyclical it all seems to be and how similar we all are regardless of race or age.
I understand how the deprivation and want for more — more money, more equity, more justice — can warp our sense of ethics and integrity and turn you into the bully you despise.
I also understand that if you’re set to destroy something, be sure to have a few on your side who are able to rebuild something in its place and have a vision of what the new thing will be. Without those two ingredients, you’re just a child beating up Cub Scouts to feel better about your circumstances.
