Not too long ago, I embodied a characteristic that I now cannot stand: I believed the poor deserved to be poor.
Thankfully, I had the experience I needed to knock the blinders off my $200 Transitions lenses in Lucky Brand frames at a library, leading me to surmise the word "deserve" should leave my vocabulary.
One day when I was 14, my mom drove me to the downtown Orlando library as part of a meeting for an engineering competition I took part in. While browsing for books on city planning, I came across an old, homeless black man named Jerry. He wore an oversized green coat and looked like an unshaven Samuel L. Jackson who'd gotten into a knife fight.
I didn't want to get too close to him.
Back then, I stood barely more than 5 feet tall, and the book I needed rested atop a shelf taller than me.
Jerry sat on the only stool afforded to that floor of the library. He was perusing the bottom shelf of the aisle.
Instead of asking Jerry for the stool, I asked one of the librarians if there were any stools I could use.
"Jerry's probably using the one," the librarian said, pointing toward the area where I already knew Jerry was.
"He's over by the urban sprawl books."
I stared at her, begging her to ask him for me with my eyes.
The librarian laughed.
"Don't worry. He doesn't bite."
In all my life, adults had approached older black strangers for me.
Having gone to minority-majority public schools for my entire education, I didn't fear (or see differently) my black peers.
But boy, was I scared of Jerry, though I wouldn't have admitted it at the time.
I sublimated the fear into insults. I thought him inconsiderate for using the stool to look at books on the bottom shelf.
I stared at Jerry from afar for a little while.
Eventually I worked up enough self-righteousness — not courage — to ask him the question.
"Are you done with the stool yet?"
He chuckled.
"Six minutes, 14 seconds," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"It took you six minutes, 14 seconds to ask me to use this stool. Why'd you wait that long?"
"I don't know. I didn't want to seem rude."
He chortled.
"Guess it only takes six minutes, 14 seconds for you to stop worrying about that."
I felt like a kid who'd been caught stealing a candy bar.
Jerry got up off the stool and rolled it over to me, walking away without another word. I got the book and went back to my team.
Later that day, as I was leaving the library, I saw Jerry and apologized to him for being rude. He accepted and we started talking.
I learned he had a master's degree and had had a job as a professor until he left it when his sister was diagnosed with cancer.
He spent all his money on his sister's treatment. He spent all the time he had staying by her side, even as she died.
Now he spends his days reading in the library with no place to live.
When I first saw Jerry, I felt like he deserved to be kicked out of the library.
Now I see that the word "deserve" served as a crutch for me to self-aggrandize and justify poor treatment of other human beings.
Moral: The concept of deserving has no objective measure and can lead people to act like monsters. If we as a people stopped using the word, I think we might treat each other a little better than we do right now.
Chip Skambis is an English and telecommunication junior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
