Wednesday, June 04, 2008

High on the Hog for Poverty Pimps

Leaders feast on Italian fare during hunger summit

For presidents and premiers at summits, delicacies washed down by fine wines are all part of the agenda.

But the puff pastries with corn and mozzarella, pasta with pumpkin and shrimp, and rolls of thinly sliced veal served up Tuesday at a U.N. conference on fighting hunger were a contrast to bleak accounts of starving people around the world.


Okay, just because other people are starving doesn't mean you have to eat Unimix and drink boiled creek water. But it's sickening when people figure out that they can live like kings on the backs of the poorest of the poor. And the most glaring example of this is when you look at the menu served up at a typical hunger summit. Pig out while pontificating about starvation. How about sending out for pizza and giving the money you save to Feed the Children, you swine?

It's hard to imagine a lifeform more loathsome than a poverty pimp.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree, although perhaps it is being too hard on folks who are actually meeting to try to do some good. But I see your point. I am currently writing a book on Christianity and what it/the Bible has to say about simple living, consumption, greed, riches, etc., and will see if I can tie this episode into what I'm trying to say.

Anonymous said...

i agree with you and fusilier...heck i think it would be cool if they got served what they feed the hungry on china plates. kinda like bate and switch thing. go to a summitt thinking you are going to dine like the royals and find out whats really for dinner. bet it isnt beef. :)

Christina Dunigan said...

There's an excellent book called "The Lords of Poverty" that looks at how people live like nabobs on the backs of the poor.

A lot of what goes on is based on the prejudicial idea that Westerners are the only ones who have a clue. We'll send some pimply-faced kid fresh out of college who's never organized anything bigger than prom decorations in her life off to a refugee camp to tell doctors how to set up a medical station. Why don't they ask who in the camp has skills, and give THEM the jobs? Just because you're displaced (and have dark skin) doesn't mean you're a skilless, clueless sad sack who needs somebody else to tell you what to do. Maybe you just need practical things like a building to work out of and some equipment to use.