Grew Up Poor. How Am I Supposed to Raise My Middle-Class Kids?

Gratitude comes by constantly learning history to understand how lucky and privileged most western kids are now (by sheer luck and nothing else).

And most times, it doesn't require history but to look at other longitudes and latitudes at the present time. Gratitude shouldn't be mental but should be acted upon - for starters stop wasting food. 

Esau McCaulley has a touching piece on the same (NYT): 

I am who I am because I had to struggle and suffer. I came from the mud, and even now I remember how the dirt tastes. When my mother told me that my grandfather grew up as a tenant farmer, I could drive past cotton fields in Alabama and imagine what his life was like. The land was bursting with memory. My children and I have returned to the South and to the very neighborhood where I grew up. I once drove my two oldest kids to the home I used to live in. But the land, the dirt and the concrete don’t speak to them the way they do to me. The ghosts do not haunt them.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of treating poverty as some kind of learning experience. Black and brown people need to have paths to success that don’t involve overcoming a legacy of racism and structural injustice. We need more ordinary roads to flourishing.

And yet, I cannot help believing that my children have lost something: the determination born of suffering. I wish that I could give them that feeling. That suffering was the context within which my mother taught me about the value of education. It formed the background of my pastors’ sermons in the Black churches of my youth. The only God that I have ever known was one who cared about my Black body and my Black soul. That suffering was a unifying factor in all my deepest friendships. Those bonds are special because of what we survived.

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The life I live is the complicated legacy of a survivor. I want to instill in my children the sense of Black possibility and responsibility that arises in the hearts of those who escaped the fire. It’s the fierce urgency born of a gratitude to God that we survived, coupled with the knowledge that it shouldn’t be that hard. It is a message that I needed when my belly was empty. I hope that my children listen now that their bellies are full.

At my family’s Thanksgiving, we all go around the table and name something we are grateful for. I am thankful for my wife and children. I am thankful for the life that they live. But I am also thankful for the things I suffered that made me who I am and for the ways that such suffering does not let you go. It ties you to all the other hurting people of the world. It gives your success a vocation and a purpose: to create more happy families gathering for family meals.