The Revolution

I'm currently attending a conference on International Development. All the big NGO's are here: World Vision, Food for the Hungry, CRWRC, and on and on. The campus at Calvin is rather nice. The Prince Conference center where I am staying is pretty nice as well.

Yet I can't help feeling the ongoing tension of writing about the poor on my new work laptop; thinking about the poor in my warm, large, hotel room; and speaking about the poor in coffee shops that are somehow supposed to ease my conscious by the fact that the coffee was "fair-trade."

I question at times whether the poor, and poverty all together, is merely a means of intellectual assent. Do I truly know that the poor exist? Have I encountered the poor? Do I feel the needs of the poor? Am I ever consumed by poverty?

Its hard to say. I think often of things like revolution, when I'm now realizing that I'm the one who needs to be overthrown.