Several weeks ago I had an extensive oral surgery procedure. The recovery period has had some unanticipated challenges the result of which is that, among other things, a liquid diet has been my daily experience for nearly a month. The months ahead will not be appreciatively different. I AM NOT COMPLAINING. ONLY REPORTING. The end result will be positive.
In the midst of the recovery and restorative process I have had a most unsettling experience. On a number of nights, sleep has included vivid dreams of food! I wake up hungry. I have to work at overcoming thoughts of eating and knowing that I can’t…yet.
There is no comparison between my dreaming of food and sensations of hunger and those of the millions of people experiencing true hunger and food insecurity. To be sure, in the midst of availability of protein shakes, smoothies, and all manner of sustaining supplements there is no comparison between my experience of dreaming of food and feeling hungry with those for whom hunger is very real.
What my dreams about food have done is provide a perspective, on an emotional level, regarding those millions of people experiencing true hunger.
It is reported by the organization Feeding America that 9 million children face hunger and are food insecure in the United States. Do they dream about food? I imagine that their dreams about food are intense. I imagine that their food dreams push all other thoughts away. In their very real dreams about food how much of their vision for their future is shaped by being hungry, waking up that way, and falling asleep that way?
I think of the important comment and lesson with which many of our children are raised; namely, such affirmations as “dream big. Follow your dreams. You can achieve great things if you work hard and pursue your dreams.”
What if your dreams are of food and a physical sense of hunger gnaws at your daily life? How do hungry children have the mental space to envision a life of fulfilling purpose, meaning, contribution, achievement, and a sense of personal value?
One of the prejudices of our disquieting and polarized times is the judgmental characterizations of desperately hungry people as being people without dreams for a better life. So many sated people, if they pay any attention to the truly hungry and impoverished at all, think of hungry children and their families as being less capable, lazy, or without ambition. When one is overwhelmed by hunger produced dreams of food, ambitions for anything other than finding something to eat are consumed.
I think it shameful to pass judgement on hungry neighbors often completely unknown and invisible to us. The isolated silos of vastly different living situations in which we find ourselves are without windows to see different realities. So, critical emotions such as empathy for those unlike us are at dangerously low levels.
This is yet another reason for my great frustration and often anger with current political and religious leaders who from their silos champion America’s current culture war. Such people, often enormously affluent themselves, or ensconced in an insulated, ‘gated community’ of like-minded supporters see the world only from their enormously privileged and isolated perspective. In that silo there is self-congratulation and a self-righteous disdain for those known to them only by biased report.
How is it that we have come to a point in our nation’s life when too many people of enormous blessing, rather than be humbled by it, self-righteously judge their lives as the model which should be imposed on everyone else? How is it that the dreams of the enormously satisfied, well fed, and comfortable are thought to be licensed to judge people of whose dreams they know little and whose life conditions they know even less?
I ask again, how is it we have come to the point that so many of us who have great blessings – rather than be humbled by it – have come to feel entitled by it? How is it that so many who have lots to eat have come to think themselves entitled to set the menu thought proper for everyone else? How is it that so many who are blessed to have sweet and pleasant dreams have come to judge so negatively those whose life dreams are consumed by great hungers and are in search of something to eat?