On Dumpster Diving By Lars Eighner

Poverty can be defined in many ways. Some consider it an issue caused by the lack of ambition in certain individuals. On the other hand, many also consider it to be an issue caused by outside forces such as class, education, and economic conditions. Essays by Lars Eighner, Anna Quindlen, and Jonathan Kozol all touch base on poverty and what it means to be in poverty.

Lars Eighner’s essay “On Dumpster Diving” comes from the perspective of a third year college dropout who started dumpster diving approximately twelve months prior to becoming homeless (citation). Almost acting as a how-to-guide on dumpster diving, Eighner gives potentially the most valuable diving tip in his essay; who throws away the most valuable things. “Students throw out many good things” (citation). He goes on to further describe his statement. “Since it is Daddy’s money”, students often discard valuable things due to “carelessness, ignorance, or wastefulness” (citation).

In Anna Quindlen’s essay “Homeless”, the college graduate interviews a homeless woman named Ann that she met in a bus terminal for a story on the homeless she was currently doing (citation). The woman said that “she was just passing through” before showing her a picture of a house, indicating to Anna that “she was somebody”

(citation). She then goes on to express how the homeless are often undervalued and reduced to simply ‘the homeless’. “We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grates” (citation).
“Untouchables” by Jonathan Kozol takes a darker and more realistic approach to poverty by describing how the general public react to homeless individuals. Being regarded as “trash” that needs to be gotten “rid of”, the homeless are often reacted towards in violent ways (citation). The homeless have risked murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and even being “set on fire” (citation). As Richard Lazarus expressed, “[w]e are the rejected waste of society” (citation).
All three essays speak about being homeless or the homeless in rather liberal ways. A common theme the essays all have is how the poor are often looked at as trash and a waste in society. There are many different forms/levels of poverty and many people in America have experience some form of it. Although I have never been homeless or to the point of stealing to feed and clothe myself, I have lived in poverty my entire life.
I never realized as a child that I was living in poverty.

I knew that I was poor, of course, but poverty, to me, had a much different definition than what it actually was. I imagined poverty to be a living state like the people in the three essays summarized earlier experienced or saw, not what I was living in. I never saw it as a bad thing because I never lived in anything different. A large portion of my life was without health or dental insurance and I was often clothed with hand-me-downs from my brother. We didn’t and still don’t have much food and do occasionally go to bed hungry, but we have never gone a day without eating something, whether it be cans of tuna or peanut butter and jelly

sandwiches.
While both sides of the argument on what creates poverty can be argued well, there is no one thing that creates poverty. Individual choices and outside forces both play a large role in what forces people to be poor. Every case of poverty is different, but there is no denying that outside forces play a larger role in most situations. Being born into a low income family makes it harder to afford the proper education that is necessary to get yourself out of the realm of low paying jobs without governmental assistance and the almost inevitable necessity of having to take out loans to pay for a higher education.