Once when I refused to eat the peanut soup that was set before me I was lectured about children starving in camps. I can recall the shame I felt but also the resentment at being made an example of, at the absurdity of the idea that my not eating this soup somehow dishonoured the suffering of those people. I knew my soup would never reach them, and so it wasn’t about that; it was about reconciling this life of privilege I had, where there was food on the table and clothes on my back, where I slept peacefully in my bed, with a world in which children just like me were starving and had no home to
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