“A run-down apartment can exacerbate a child’s asthma, which leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mother’s punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning capacity, which confines her to poor housing.”
- David Shipler "The Working Poor: Invisible in America"
It is one thing to become impoverished, but it is another thing entirely to be born into an underserved and under represented population as a whole. Poverty wasn't a spur of the moment happenstance that allowed the tightening choke hold of being without to sporadically reproduce itself like a bacterium into existence, it was nurtured and allowed festering time to cook and mutate, deepening its claws of educational deprivation and socio economic divergence. In such a cyclic system such as poverty, the only option is to survive. Survive or be swallowed up by the perpetual vortex of depression, despair, and self deprecation.
Being "poor", from my understanding of Shipler's text, is a connective tissue bound by vascular life choices that have either elevated an individual and then repented of the initial success or choices that have began as failures, ending in the same long sorrowful chord. Largely as a culture, we judge because we have been taught to judge and specially with impoverished populations, we are taught that they are lazy, drug addicts, that have no purpose in life other than weighing down the economic standing.
It upsets me greatly to even utter those words. My family has been there. My mother grew up in a working class home, where every bite they had to eat was bought with the blood, sweat, and tears poured out by my single parent grand mother who held three jobs at one time.
Every decision is one that will either make or break you. Its one brick after another, paving the way to freedom or eternal chains.
- David Shipler "The Working Poor: Invisible in America"
It is one thing to become impoverished, but it is another thing entirely to be born into an underserved and under represented population as a whole. Poverty wasn't a spur of the moment happenstance that allowed the tightening choke hold of being without to sporadically reproduce itself like a bacterium into existence, it was nurtured and allowed festering time to cook and mutate, deepening its claws of educational deprivation and socio economic divergence. In such a cyclic system such as poverty, the only option is to survive. Survive or be swallowed up by the perpetual vortex of depression, despair, and self deprecation.
Being "poor", from my understanding of Shipler's text, is a connective tissue bound by vascular life choices that have either elevated an individual and then repented of the initial success or choices that have began as failures, ending in the same long sorrowful chord. Largely as a culture, we judge because we have been taught to judge and specially with impoverished populations, we are taught that they are lazy, drug addicts, that have no purpose in life other than weighing down the economic standing.
It upsets me greatly to even utter those words. My family has been there. My mother grew up in a working class home, where every bite they had to eat was bought with the blood, sweat, and tears poured out by my single parent grand mother who held three jobs at one time.
Every decision is one that will either make or break you. Its one brick after another, paving the way to freedom or eternal chains.
The title kicks off an incredibly written piece and the picture brings it full circle!
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