All-you-can-stuff-in-your-face Buffet

Sometimes I get these moments of clarity. Today I had one while I was walking between the aisles of an all-you-can-eat buffet watching all these people heaping food onto their plates (people who looked exactly like I looked five minutes before, on my second round). A pile of dismembered crabs, a mountain of rice, a sugar-plum feast straight out of Hansel and Gretel. Half a cow in riblets, an ocean of wonton soup.

How this usually seems normal to me is confounding. The old "eat your vegetables" guilt trip "Children are starving in Africa" rang clear in my head. And yet it wasn't a feeling of guilt. It was more a feeling of awe. Plentiful doesn't even begin to describe...

This gets me thinking, though. What's the use in comparing two completely different situations? It's an obvious inequality that there are heaps of food on our plates and scarcely a grain of rice on the plates of some. And so Tolstoy's great question returns: What, then, must we do?

Two things I learned recently come to mind. I just finished Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood, who comments on the awful enslavement that debt causes, especially when what you take from someone is their means of survival. Second, a radio interview with someone whose name I (sadly) cannot recall, who suggested that foreign aid in the form of cash was detrimental rather than helpful. The old proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime" seems apt. For how long have we loaned foreign governments money without any signs of this leading to progress? And for how long will we continue to do so?

And then, do I feel strongly enough to do anything about it? I could make a lot of excuses about how I'm not qualified and how I couldn't possibly affect this outcome as a lowly Bachelor of Music. And how Politicians and CEOs seem to have this ethereal quality in my imagination; they don't seem real since they operate on a completely different set of rules than everyone else. Their world might as well be Narnia. Or Mordor.

I came up with a cool guitar lick today.