Being Envious of the Darndest Things

As a child, I missed a lot of school. Somehow or another, I was the subject of envy with most of my classmates. OOoooh look at resignedidealist, she gets to skip school again. I remember coming back to school and realizing I was being ostracized for circumstances beyond my control. Furthermore, the envy was about the apparent freedom I had.

Well, this is what I did when I wasn't going to school. I was wheezing in the night, unable to catch my breath. I was throwing up every bit of mucus my lungs could dredge up as well as any bit of food that lingered along the path of the hurl. I was bent over, scared that I would die, scared that my family would abandon me for I was so much trouble, scared that being sick again would mean further ostracizing at school. Oh yeah baby, let me enjoy that again. NOT!

But no one realized my misery. All they saw was, I get to skip school again. (BTW, my sister still thinks my childhood was wonderful.)

Fast forward to today. There are some of you *gasping* that the Federal Gov't is handing out $2,000 to each displaced person.

For those of you who think $2,000 is too much (I'm suddenly reminded of the scene in Sense & Sensibility where the half-brother gets convinced by his money/title-grubbing wife to lower the amount of allowance for his step-mother and half-sisters), let me just ask you this. If YOU stood in filth for three to four days, if YOU had gone without food and water for three to four days, if YOU had been packed in like sardines with murders and rapes going on around you (a 7-year old girl was found in a room of dead people in the Superdome - her throat had been cut), does $2,000 seem enough?