Jason

Out here at work, we've got a pop machine and a snack machine. The prices are outrageously high. It used to be just a pop machine, but then they added the snack machine, asking $0.90 for the smallest of items. This made me angry, both because of the slow roll of inflation but also because I could buy two of the same item at a grocery store for that price - was the convenience charge really 100%?
So I fashioned a hilarious meme to put on the vending machine. I was going to print it and tape it to the machine...I figured the rest of the folks out here would find it hilarious. Of course they would! I'm hilarious! I left it here on my desk Friday when I went home, and forgot to put it up.

I was down in the break room, heating my lunch today, when two men came in. One appeared to be in his fifties, the other in his late 20's. The younger one, I immediately noticed, had a strangely-shaped skull, and as the older man talked to him kindly...slowly...a picture began to form in my head and the crushing weight of shame descended.

"Jason" is a mentally-challenged person about the same age as me. His job is to ride around in a van he cannot legally drive and refill the vending machines at various businesses here in the southwest corner of Kansas City that have signed up to have their machines filled by a cooperative called Johnson County Developmental Supports. The older man is his guide in this: he drives the van, helps count the money, helps Jason load the right cans of pop back into the machine and the right snacks into the other machine. And off they go to their next location. It's inefficient, meticulous - and completely explains the high vending machine prices.

And there I had stood, last Friday, smugly chuckling to myself about my hilarious yet-to-be-deployed meme.

It's a tough thing for me to do, writing this. I'm a proud man. I have a master's degree in engineering. I am the star engineer at my company. I've got everything going for me, and I knew it all weekend as I strutted around the city with an arrogant confidence that one gets when one has nothing to fear and turns a blind eye to his own weakness(es).
Then there's Jason. What separates me from him? A few tweaked genes is probably all. A dice-roll, and 3 billion base pairs, and I sailed through unhindered. Him? Not so much. And so I get to live my charmed life, work hard at a job I love, make lots of money, raise a family, create the future, while Jason's life is one spent filling vending machines and living in a group home.

And what of the selfless soul - the older man - who is helping Jason put soda in a machine? How can I possibly look a man of that caliber in the face? I am a shadow of this man. Had I put the picture up on that vending machine its meaning would have been lost on Jason, of that I'm sure (thank God). But the kind older man...he'd have seen it, and my heart clenches like a fist thinking of him internalizing my sarcastic complaint.

"Whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me."

Eyes wet with tears of shame, I went back down to the break room, asked Jason for a Coke while the machine was still open, gave him my dollar, and thanked him. I hate feeling like this. I hate it. But every time I do, it's my own damn fault.
I am not ashamed of being smart. I am ashamed that I take it for granted.

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