By RAY WADDLE

Last week, a movie quietly premiered on HBO that contradicts just about everything.

Originally a play by actor/writer Wallace Shawn, The Fever is mostly a monologue by an urbane arts patron who agonizes about poor people, political revolt, and his relationship to them.

The narrator wonders how it is possible to live ethically in a global society where our comforts are made possible by the cheap wages — often the brute poverty — of nameless others. The play made its debut in 1990, but the film release points to a new shift in public thinking about poverty.

The Fever is merciless. The narrator wakes to the reality that he is living a lie. Thriving in a wealthy nation, he realizes he lives in a bubble that keeps certain facts out.

When shopping for a new coat, he comes to realize the bargain price represents the actual history of everyone involved in making the coat.

"And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside," he writes.

That is true of any commodity of exploitation.

"The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked."

We make peace with this by assuming these are unalterable economic patterns, and anyway the poor are ill-equipped to wield power or run the world or spend money well. Yet we think of ourselves as compassionate, Shawn writes. Nothing must contradict this sacred fact: I am a decent person.

According to UNESCO, 30,000 children will die today from illness or other causes related to poverty — 30,000. The worlds 500 richest individuals have the same income as the worlds poorest 416 million individuals, political columnist Nicholas Kristof observes.

Embarrassed at this rich-poor imbalance, opinion-makers are mobilizing. Democrat John Edwards is making poverty a central campaign issue. Bono, Bill Gates and minister Rick Warren are focusing Western compassion on African AIDS, malaria, foreign debt. Church-sponsored mission trips abroad are more popular than ever.

"The poor you will always have with you," Jesus said. Generations of fatalists took his words as proof that nothing can be done. But a counter interpretation declares Jesus was echoing the divine command in Deuteronomy 15: "Open your hand to the poor," it says, because "there will never cease to be some in need on the earth."

The Fever (the movie version stars Vanessa Redgrave with other celeb cameos) maintains a secular orientation. But its moral outrage breaks onto a religious plane, inviting viewers to hear the cries of the 30,000.