“A Harlem Brown-Bag Lunch in South Korea”
Thomas Sowell, again. Priceless:
When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe but put a folded piece of newspaper in his shoe to cover the hole, rather than tell his parents.
He realized that they would buy him a new pair of shoes if they knew — and he also realized that they could not afford it.
He went on to become a professor at several well-known medical schools and to rack up various achievements and honors over the years.
From even further back in time, I received a letter recently from a man who grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown-bag lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria without having to pay for it.
It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity — and he wouldn’t swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out.
By now his brown-bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that day. He went on to become a very successful psychiatrist.
Hit the link and read the rest of it. It’s not long.