Hard to swallow

It’s called a “Hunger Banquet.”

Oxfam explains it like this: guests to a meal are given a ticket at random. Fifty percent of those are designated as “poor” and will help themselves to only small portions of rice and water. Another 35 percent is seen as middle class and is served rice and beans. The next 15 percent are the upper class and will be served a “sumptuous buffet.” 

I saw one in Wright Place food court the other day, and the looks being thrown between participants would have made Marx proud.

There, on the floor, were the poor, who cast vicious glances at those being served the buffet, who could hardly eat for their guilt.

The implied lesson, that in America, our entire lives are these so-called “sumptuous buffets” (and we should carry an approximately generous portion of guilt), will apparently teach the apparently novel idea that there exists in the world a disparity of income, and sometimes people go hungry.

But that’s where the Hunger Banquet’s lesson takes a strange left turn. The implied dynamic that one’s social status is determined by pure chance, that there exists no means to change one’s position and that wealth is a zero-sum game (only 15 percent can be rich, and the poor are poor because the rich are rich), are the sort of defeated ideas that lead to poverty in the first place.

I don’t think you’d find anyone who would argue that poverty is somehow deserved, or a conscious choice, but equally rare are logical people who would assert that poverty just happens.

The world is full of examples of people who, within a couple generations of eating rice at society’s proverbial floor, worked their way up. Also numerous are people whose unwise decisions squandered their wealth and ended their “sumptuous buffet.”

Most of the countries who tried to alleviate poverty by taking from the rich, instead of helping the poor earn more, wound up poorer than before. However, cathartic it may have been to lash out at the wealthy in China during Mao’s reforms, under Castro, or in the USSR, after a day of screaming yourself hoarse you went back to a house with no more food than before.

To describe the world’s food supply as a fixed-shape pie, over which social classes all fight for their share, is also untrue. Society has made huge leaps in food production throughout the years, but for many of the poor, these improvements have been outpaced by population increases, war and disease.

But no one is poor because someone else is rich. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game.
Oxfam might inspire guilt and put money in its coffers with its Hunger Banquets, but its oddly Marxian message smacks of a world view that has lead to more hunger, not less.

And until people change their mindset about wealth from “Why does he get that?” to “How do I get that, too?”, poverty will never change.