In the photograph, she is holding an emaciated child. There have been, surely, enough of them, a

In the photograph, she is holding an emaciated child. There have been, surely, enough of them, a ready supply of emaciated children in Mother Teresa’s life. She has lived in a sea of sick, a Black Hole of Calcutta’s poor. Even though, if she were to distribute every dollar of her $192,000 Nobel Peace Prize, one by one, she would run out of money long before she ran out of poor in that one teeming city. The portrait of this woman is absolutely awesome. She is no statesman who makes a treaty in an air-conditioned chamber and then goes home to a ticker-tape parade（抛投纸带的迎宾仪式）. Here is a woman who gets up every morning of her life to tend endless streams of victims of life’s longest war of attrition（消耗战）. Without an expectation of victory. Most of us in her place could not have stood a week or a two-year tour of duty before being overwhelmed by pain and a sense of futility. There are times we all look at good work and good workers as if they were shoveling sand into the wind. But here is a woman who always sees people. So, the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Mother Teresa is a pinch at our consciences---that unpopular and obsolete part of our ethical anatomy. People today don’t talk about their consciences and how to appease them; they talk about guilt-trips（负罪感） and how to avoid them.