At Penn Station in New York City,

while an antsy crowd of us watched the tote board for the departure gate for our slightly late train to Washington (maybe you know the drill: the track number suddenly appears on the sign and everybody dashes to try to grab an alone seat), a woman behind me was carping about the delay: This is ridiculous, What's Amtrak's problem, Why are we standing here, yada yada. I almost turned around and said to her, "Every day, there are people in the Middle East being blown to bloody bits with the help of your tax dollars. There are toddlers in central Africa with parasitic worms eating away at their intestines. There are corpses of parents, drying like snakeskins in the Mexican desert, who didn't make it here to pick your damned strawberries so they could send the money back home. What do you know about hardship? The train is 10 minutes late, for God's sake. Shut the hell up."

We Americans are so spoiled, and so many of us are so clueless about it. What a slew of awful lessons we've yet to learn.