Dinner For Six

The table is set for us to eat. The most succulent morsels from all over the world are on display. The rarest treats and the finest delicacies are piled decadently high. All of our most advanced technology has been applied towards a bountiful harvest. Forests have cut been cut down to make way for farmland on which to grow corn to feed the fatted calves. Our oceans have been over-fished to a critical degree in order to make this feast worthy of those who are to gorge themselves on more than they possibly need.

And yet there are only six seats. There is no place for you at this table, set with gold-plated eating utensils and bone china, resting upon the finest linen hand-spun by children working in sweatshops. Your place is somewhere lower. Your place is as a shim for the table leg in order to ensure stability, and if you work your way out of it you will be hammered back in. Your place is to sit patiently with the dogs, hoping for a scrap to be thrown to you. Your task is to either be the most obedient or the most entertaining. Perhaps if you are cute enough and obsequious enough you shall get special attention, an extra-large slice of meat.

True, there is a children’s table, where the more successful and more self-promoting table shims are allowed to eat, but they shall be served last and silence and acquiescence will be demanded of them. They will be called upon to dutifully step away from their meal should someone at the big table drop their knife and require a clean one. Most of them will do as they are told, remembering what it was like to be a table shim. Having climbed up from beneath the table, they now view themselves as like unto those six who sit at the big table, eagerly looking towards the time where they can sit at the big table where someone other than themselves props it up.

There is a table upon which half the wealth of all humanity sits, constructed by and heaped full of the earth’s harvest through the effort and the labor of us all. So heavily laden with obscene portions of animal flesh is it that it crushes those below whose task it is to hold this table up. So heavy is it that the floorboards groan at their burden, and yet daily more is piled upon it. It is surrounded by six ornately decorated chairs more luxurious than any throne any king or pharaoh, emperor or monarch, has ever sat on. And below it, more people than Genghis Khan had in his hordes, more people than ever worshipped Ramses II as a god. Animal-like, many of them clamor and fight each other to lick at the occasional drop of gravy that falls on the floor. Others simply starve for lack of anything to eat. But their lives and deaths take place beneath the table, covered by the fancy linen so that those at the table never have to contemplate such unpleasantries. When dining with the elite of society, such conversations should be avoided at the dinner table.

There is room at this table for many. There is room, should the effort be undertaken, for all. It is not that the table needs shims to prop it up, it is that there is too much placed upon it for a mere six individuals to consume. The table is too heavily laden, and when it eventually falls it will fall upon those who have been doing the thankless task of holding it up.

It is simply a matter of how we choose to set the table. Those who sit at the table now are the ones who established the seating arrangement, though they would have you believe they have harvested the crops and cooked the meal as well. It is time we once again remember to thank the cooks for their efforts, the farmers who toiled in the fields that this dinner might be possible. They deserve respected seats at the table. We all had a hand in making this meal possible, and we must remember to be appreciative of each other, not just the six who sit above us. And we must remember, too, those outside who have nothing, and invite them to share in the bounty, for when we cannot see the humanity in the least of us, we begin to stop seeing it in everyone else as well.