You know, when I tell people that I was homeless for a couple of years, they generally ask me, "by choice, or like, homeless homeless?" And honestly, the only people who ask that question are people who have no frame of reference. Either that, or they're trying to justify the way that they live, and the way which they treat homeless people. When I was homeless, or even when I tell other homeless people that I was, they never ask me to qualify it. They understand that, it doesn't matter how you got there, what matters is where you are at. If you are homeless, then there you are, with them, experiencing the hardships that they experience and longing for what they long for.

Same thing goes for hunger. I've been thinking a lot about hunger lately. My job has led me to do a lot of research into hunger in America, in New York, in Broome County, in Binghamton and in my community. Being hungry taught me a considerable amount about what it's like for me to be hungry. Now I'm gaining perspective. I'm gaining understanding. So, when there's a discussion about the need in my community or in my country and someone ventures to say, "Why are they without? We need to get to the root of this." I say yes, and we need to feed them. Anyone who is hungry, I have no need of asking why in the moment. That is a question for me. The question for a hungry person is, "How will I eat?"

This infectious moralizing has the effect of helping us deal with our own guilt, but rarely does it help the hungry get fed. It has a sort of mass appeal, because in the way in which we live where even life sustaining food is commodotized to the point where everyone could eat their fill and there could still be enough to go around, we maintain our ideas even to death, lest we face the reality that life is much more simple than we suppose it to be.

When I think about moments in my life when I humbled myself, I can understand it all. One time when I was hitchhiking in Alabama, I was tired. I was hungry. I was sick.

I had heard that Cracker Barrel was owned by Mormons, and that they do not refuse hungry people who need to be fed. I found a Cracker Barrel in an interstate strip-mall that looked like most others. I went inside and I said, "I am hungry, and I am tired. I have no money, and I have heard that you will feed me." They took me in and they fed me biscuits with sausage gravy, cornbread and hot tea until I could eat and drink no more. Then they sent me out with a bag full of biscuits and cornbread, which lasted me for days. I did not feel judged. I did not feel ashamed. It was the very most human of experiences in a place which I so often associate with inhumanity: the interstate strip-mall.

~

I hear through the Americorps Alumni network that there is a national civil service school in the federal legislature that, if established, will offer by way of civil service, what the government now only offers for military service. A place where someone can serve their country for a number of years, and learn the most essential skills in serving their community, and get their degree as part of the package deal. And I can think of nothing that my generation needs right now more than a thing like this.

I see the listless and directionlessness of my generation all of the time, and it worries me. Many people I know have joined the military because it offers them the structure in their life which they cannot seem to attain elsewhere. What better way to find that structure, that meaning, than through serving one's own community. Military service is alright, and I suppose that it provides some indirect service to one's community, though I have yet to really understand what that is. Teaching young people to find a meaningful life in service to the place in which they live is so tangible, so visceral.

If we had a generation of youth who were capable community servants as a simple matter of course, then what would we come to expect of our leaders? We would likely expect them to at least be capable community servants; capable of administering a municipality with the deftness and acumen which mothers and fathers come to know the act of changing a diaper. What use would we have for so many ranting ideologues in government, when we come to realize that efficacy in civil service is not like locating wells with forked sticks?

This is only my second week on the job, and already my mind is buzzing with the possibilities. The people with whom I work posess political beliefs that have been formed through trial and error. This serves to reaffirm my belief that tempered and effective political ideas are the result of tapping into one's own well-spring of empassioned action. When we submit ourselves to that which truly motivates us, even without a bit of understanding, we come--in time--to efficacy and the temperance of understanding. Wisdom comes through the journey of self-actualization.

I find more and more that people who act in order to understand are the kind of people who I want to work with, and the people who act from a place of knowing are people whom I am compelled away from.