Analysis Of What's Killing Poor White Women By Pottts

Education and the Great Divide

Education has become such a common commodity in America that people have forgotten how important it truly is. Important to the point that it might be the difference between living a long and happy life, and living a terribly short one. The problem is that schooling isn’t as evenly spread-out as people would like to believe. There is a clear divide in the level of education that people receive between people of small rural towns and big urban cities. The divide doesn’t just end at schooling though, the level of schooling has a clear correlation with life expectancy; higher levels of education lead to longer lives lived. Education is what teaches people the health benefits from eating a salad instead of a juicy

Big Mac, shows how to budget to inch out every last dollar until the next paycheck, and screams at people the importance of washing their hands and getting regular check-ups.
In the essay “What’s Killing Poor White Women” written by Monica Potts, she writes about the many dangers that poverty-stricken white women face.

The main purpose of the article is to show that the poor white women of rural towns deal with a multitude of difficulties which could lead to the steep decline if their life expectancy, and the majority of them stem from the lack of education the they receive. The primary support for her article comes from the personal account of Crystal Wilson and her family (a poorly educated family in rural Arkansas). Potts makes her statement clear with a concluding quote from the technology coordinator for the Cave City schools, Julie Johnson: “… I don’t know anything about anything, but that’s what kills them” (Potts

609).
The shortcomings in hours alive begins with nutrition. The impoverished are unable to get the education they need to even apply to the majority of jobs out there, so they have little to no income and mostly have to live off of government checks or food stamps. Having very little to spend generally means that they have to eat food that’s less than desirable when it comes to nutrition because it’s what they can afford. Looking at it from a commercial stand point, nutrition just costs more. To grow things fresh and without pesticides or anything takes more time which costs more labor. Whereas feeding a long row of cow’s cheap scraps, and freezing the burgers they later turn into is far cheaper, and can be done on a much larger scale. This leaves the poor to be forced to choose between whether they want to eat healthy foods and starve half of the time, or eat terrible foods and always have enough to eat.
That is if they even know about the nutritional values of the foods they eat.

With an educational background of high school or less it is very likely to not know what “nutrition” even means. Not having an understanding of nutrition and how the things one eats matters leads to a variety of complications by itself. The most common disease it generally leads to is diabetes; the ever-growing plague of America. Diseases like this are even worse in the uneducated than in the average population because of the severe lack of understanding. The poor lack the understanding needed to communicate with their physicians about any problems, and fail to know the severity of their disease. Without knowing how severe their disease is they may choose to ignore it and hope it somehow goes away, or just choose not to go about fixing their lifestyle to survive it. For example, if someone suddenly found out that they had diabetes due to their lackluster diet; the educated and uneducated may behave drastically differently. The wealthy would have been educated about how severe diseases of this nature can be and how easily they can ultimately lead to death. With that knowledge, they would inevitably change their diet, and fight their way through it all until their body was in a better place and could slowly go back to normal. Those in poverty however, might assume that because they’re not in pain they are perfectly healthy. Diseases below the surface don’t work that way though, and the inflicted

would slowly eat their way to death with a smile on their face.
Lifestyle diseases aren’t even the top of the list when it comes to sickness and the poverty sadly. At least those are generally slow; the real killers are viruses and germ-related sicknesses. A clear example of how prevalent and important teaching the importance of hygiene is a study done at Auburn University on Hand Hygiene. The study found that the average percent of people that wash their hands after the restroom is as low as 60% (Taylor et. al. 1). Furthermore, the study found that the people that choose not to wash their hands claim to be sick more often than those that do (1). A statistic so low for the average population has drastic consequences for those in poverty. Without the education to know that washing hands is necessary, it can be assumed that these people would have a far lesser statistic, but even if it was as high as 60% they would still be in trouble. The average population has the means to get help if they get the flu or any other viral disease, whereas the poor don’t have such luxuries. Many times, they have to simply “tough it out” and hope they get better.
Basically, the less fortunate have less knowledge about diseases and how important hand washing, and hygiene in general is. That leaves them far more susceptible to disease, and vastly more likely to become ill, serious or otherwise. With a higher likelihood of sickness, they need medical attention more than most, but that only makes things worse. Chances are, a child in poverty grows up rarely getting any check-ups or doctor visits. They rarely get check-ups because that is just another cost that is difficult to pay for when money is always tight. Ignoring regular check-ups just by itself leaves them far greater chance to not catch any difficult diseases until it’s too late. It gets worse though, without regular check-ups they grow up with the idea that going to the doctor isn’t all that necessary, so they’re more likely to end up deciding to tough things out whenever they do end up getting sick, and again are more likely to wait until things are simply too late.
Knowing what to do health-wise still wouldn’t save all in poverty though. A big part of becoming impoverished is an inability to manage money and make sure that it lasts. Being bad with money is a tumorous factor in families in that it snowballs from parent to child. If a person is unable to manage their money then he/she will end up taking away chances for their future children. One of these chances (of course) is education, and taking that away leaves them with a very shaky foundation in controlling inhibitions and working with numbers. Both of which are essential for working out a monthly budget. Without the know-how to budget money the cycle continues with future generations and just keeps repeating itself.
A lot of this could be solved just by getting a job with a decent salary. In the current state of things that is nearly impossible without the proper education though. Almost every job now requires at least a high school degree, and a decent majority of those require a bachelor’s degree. Employers require more and more education as time goes on, so the destitute are having an increasingly hard time finding work. Without being able to find a job they are left with no opportunities to climb their way out. Rather they are forced to accept where they are and just deal with it until they meet their end.
All of these problems can be solved with the addition of further education. When a person chooses to forgo the free high school education offered to them, they are indirectly saying that they want to die sooner because “school sucks.” If taken to a broader scope, adding in those without college level education, statistics seem to be more dire. There would be approximately “200,000 fewer premature deaths would occur in people aged 30 and above each year if everyone had the same death rate as those with [college level] degrees” (Steingrı´msdo´ttir et. al. 1). If the importance of a college level degree can be as high as 200,000 deaths then one can only imagine the pertinence of getting at least a high school degree. Education is the foundation to a vast array of articles of life, and is too essential to life expectancy to take any less than available.