First World Problems

We have all come across people who do nothing else as much as they complain. In fact, if they have nothing to complain about then they wen complain about that. I know such a person, and what such a person said the last time I sat next to him in class angered me. 

"I'm starving!" he cried out. Nobody paid him any attention. Usually I sit on the other end of the classroom, far away from him but that day I sat in his complaints lair next to my fellow group project members unbeknownst to the fact that he would turn up, seeing as he was not there the day before - and I had not expected him to sit in his original spot anyway seeing as his group members sat elsewhere. "I am so hungry!" he tried again, looking around for any source of attention, his face drooping to emphasise the emptiness of his stomach. Before he tried the third time, he caught some attention, but from the wrong person: me, and boy was I riled up. 

"When did you last eat?" I asked. He turned his head slowly like a sleepy owl and stared at me in confusion - he expected someone to agree and mope along with him, not somebody who wanted to challenge this notion that he thought everyone agreed with. "Sorry?"

"When did you last eat?" I repeated. 

"What's that got to do with anything?"

He really annoyed me now. "You can't possibly be that hungry. When did you eat the last thing you ate?"

He paused, seeing if anyone would agree with him and his dire need for food before he continued to answer me. "An hour ago," he finally said. 

"Exactly."

He was stunned at my response. As a person who looks like I cannot leave the vicinity of food, he could not believe that I was actually disagreeing with him. 

The fact is that at any given time, there is a person without food. At any given time there is a person without water, a person without a home, shelter, fresh drinking water, a person without an education, a person without access to any of the western civilisation's many privilages, yet people like this man sit in capitalist organisations which work to ensure our future exploitation and complain about things he has too much of. There sits a vending machine right outside our classroom and a massive cafeteria fifteen steps down the corridor. Alas, this man feels the need to complain senselessly about his so-called 'starvation'. I want to see this man experience the lives of those in third world countries, to walk in their lack of shoes, to leave his Prada glasses so that he could possibly look through the lens of poverty, so that maybe by some miracle he can appreciate what he has. 

He honestly angered me so. And unfortunately there are a lot of people out there like this 'starving' university student who had to endure a painstaking hike from the carpark to the classroom in the boiling heat without a drop of water or a bite of food. Heaven forbid if he has to walk two minutes to a filtered drinking fountain behind our classroom. Shame on you.