The Birth of a Suburban Revolutionary

"40,000 people . . . 40,000 people!" The concept twisted and turned in Nate's head like a fitful sleeper. He was still tense and emotional though it had been a day since his Geography 1010 teacher shared the grim statistic. "40,000 people!"

The professor had been addressing 3rd world development before a sea of lethargic college freshman when he casually dropped the statistic: "40,000 people die every day from starvation and preventable water-born diseases."

"40,000 people . . . starve . . . every day!" The concepts slashed into Nate's conscience and lit a fire under his chest.

Having grown up in American suburbia, Nate had been insulated from the monumental inequities that face the majority of the world population. In Nate's childhood there had been neither hunger nor death. Indeed, Nate had lived a sheltered life, and like the life lived by Guatama, it all came crashing down in a moment.


"85% of these deaths are children under 18" Remarked the professor.

"Children!" thought Nate as the burning in his chest cooled to a hollow astonishment. He glanced around. To his right was a young woman who stared blankly towards the professor. Her chin rhythmically popped up and down as she chewed gum. Nate could smell the mint. To his left, a young man punched buttons on a cell phone with his thumb, peering at its blue luminescence from beneath a new-looking white baseball cap.

"40,000 people!" The thought filled Nate with a sense of urgency. His mind questioned, "If so many are dying, why aren't we doing anything about it?" Feverishly, his mind further queried, "why does high school close so students can comb the mountainsides for a single lost child and yet it is business as usual every other day though 40,000 humans starve . . . every . . . day?"

Nate's thought of his church and its touted welfare and humanitarian system. Images of gleaming white grain silos and pallets of canned peaches filled his mind. These gleaming images faded next to the grim reality of the 40,000 people a day that the system was failing. The image of the towering white silos naturally led Nate's mind the towering white spires of the temple that his church had just finished building in his town. The bright marble spires crowned with a triumphant golden statute of an angel . Nate imagined how the temple would look if it had been built out of sacks of flour.

Walking home from the university the next day, Nate's mind still seethed. It was as if the souls of that day's 40,000 followed him through the streets. He looked down at his clean white healthy hands. "ten fingers" he thought, "it would take 8,000 hands to count up all of the dead." Nate imagined a pile of 8,000 severed hands.

In the future years, the fire under Nate's chest continued to burn. Though it sometimes flickered and smoldered under the burden of pop-culture, pop-consumerism, and pop-religion, the fire never went out.