But maybe I should back up a bit first: our organization has partnered with our high school's football team to provide character education, leadership development, and a host of positive activities aimed at making our players well-rounded individuals. Since this partnership started during the long, sweltering days of this past summer, I have been bent on getting these young men everything I could possibly scrounge up: food, off-the-field uniforms, anything.
- - -
They battled through July and August.
Some came to practice hungry, hustling 4-5 hours in the debilitating sun on an empty stomach. Some literally left behind lives lived in the streets, shelving more "lucrative endeavors" for something that didn't pay in pockets wadded full of cash, but in hearts filled to the brim with strength and dignity and self-determination. Even still, it's not an easy sell. As one prospective player phrased it to our Coach: "Sorry, Coach, I get what you're trying to do here, and I appreciate it. I really do. But every minute I spend here, I'm losing money on the streets--and I have to eat." Unfortunately, this young man made his choice. I can't blame him, he had to. Yet the good news is that a handful under the same circumstances...found the strength to choose differently.
Do you believe that? Some of these kids would go hungry in order to be a part of something. Do you know what that tells me? They have another type of hunger that burns far more than any stomach-deep hunger pangs. They're hungry to prove themselves, to show that they're worth something, to show that 50 or so black and hispanic young men from the inner city of Camden, New Jersey are far more than the statistics you may read or the perceptions you may have, however unfounded they are. They're hungry to show us--to show themselves.
So imagine my absolute heartbreak as I watched all that these kids had worked for, all they had earned, all but slip away on tonight, their first game. As the clock ticked down, I had a knot in my stomach. The scoreboard read, in loud, blaring red numbers: "26-6."
It wasn't fair.
Not just the score--everything. It's not fair that our kids crotch on that 50 yard line wearing 12 different shades of white jerseys, some so unabashedly tattered, staring down eleven perfectly pressed, gleaming jet black vestiments with shiny, new matching helmets. But it's much more than nice, new uniforms, or facilities, or even chipper tailgaters crowded around brand-new RV's in the parking lot. Our kids are bruised, dirty, broken, and destitute long before they ever set foot on that perfectly manicured, suburban turf field. What I'm trying to say, and just can't put into words, is that it doesn't matter what that scoreboard said tonight. In the game of life, our kids are getting shut out.
How stark a contrast I witnessed this evening, amidst my Camden brothers and sisters in the bleachers, separated by far more than just a turf field from those (mostly) rich and comfortable across the way. It's really ideologies that separate us from them. It's the same ideologies that place two armed police officers on our side of the field, and not even a security officer on theirs. It's the same ideologies that compels a young kid from the opposing side to take one look at me and my (African American) friend on the way to the concession stand and "whisper" to their mother with regressive shock, "She's with a white man!"
Do you really know what two miles can mean? It can be the gap between dimensions, the distance between worlds. It can be the almost insurmountable interval between our society and any real hope and change for the future. Bleak as the picture may seem at times, I always have hope in my God that this future-tense hope can one day turn into present-tense progress.
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