It's not very often that someone who's made friends and toured sweatshops in Honduras, China, Bangladesh and Cambodia comes to speak on campus.
It's not very often that someone who's done all those things lives in Muncie.
Kelsey Timmerman fits both descriptions. It's part of what makes his book - this year's Freshman Common Reader, "Where Am I Wearing?" - a good read.
Timmerman is just an average Joe out exploring the world, trying to figure it out. Specifically, he wants to understand the international business and production process that brings most of us our clothes.
But throughout the book's pages, readers are exposed to Timmerman's reflections on a lot more, from poverty and justice to hope and hard work to marriage and family.
My favorite one of his reflections comes in the preface, after he talks about how the things he saw while traveling in some of the poorest parts of the world helped him better understand where he fits in as a global citizen.
"The second edition of 'Where Am I Wearing' is essentially about the sacrifices parents and children make for one another in the hopes of a better life," Timmerman writes. "Until I looked upon my own children, I only saw the world through the invincible eyes of a son."
Most of us are sons and daughters; few of us are parents yet. How many of us are living life with invincible eyes? We know bad things happen elsewhere, but our worlds are so comparatively comfortable, so secure, it really is hard to imagine the reality of the kind of poverty Timmerman describes seeing.
Yet, it exists. And out of it come our T-shirts and jeans and flip-flops.
Timmerman offers no real solution to the problem of poverty, or the coexistence of incomparably different producer and consumer societies. He encourages us to be engaged consumers, to pressure companies to be more forthcoming about their production practices.
Perhaps he will offer more advice on just how to do that during his speech tonight. No doubt he will tell a few amusing stories that didn't make it into the book.
It should be a presentation worth watching. Who knows? It might even wet a few of our invincible eyes.
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