Our Tired Our Poor, Our Children Analysis

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San Antonio’s Complete Disregard for the Homeless and Impoverished Sleeping in a cramped one-room apartment with six or even seven other people, or even worse, sleeping in the gutter; these are major problems faced by millions of Americans everyday. Especially in our city of San Antonio the problems of poverty and homelessness are rampant. The poor are looked at by the middle class and upper class as second class citizens. Often times policies are made that inconvenience or even severely hurt the impoverished. Although San Antonio has several programs to help the homeless and impoverished, the city has shown time and again that it does not care as much as it should about helping the needy; even actively trying to sabotage the poor and individuals Anna Quindlen, a celebrated novelist and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, writes “Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Kids.” The essay gives a window into life for impoverished citizens in our country and the how families struggle to survive in this system. Families are struggling just to survive with the little government assistance they receive. The quality and space in a shelter or even government provided living is atrocious and, to be frank, borderline unlivable. Quindlen describes a family of six cramped into a single bedroom, an inexcusable and terrible way to live and yet better than nothing at all (332). Children of families that have to live in situations like this grow up not knowing stability or security. Quindlen, passing on the sentiments of the children who live in these housings: “The older kids can’t wait to get out of this one” and “He’s humiliated, living here” (332). These kids are stricken by poverty and want nothing more than to have their own When distributing hot home cooked meals to homeless people on one night in April 2015, just as she has for the past fifteen years, Cheever was issued a $2,000 fine in order for her to be made an example of. (Garcia 2015). The police of San Antonio are trying to dissuade any would be do gooders. The police of San Antonio are mixed up. For some reason the police see the homeless as a problem that needs to be fixed but that is just it; the problem is homelessness and not the people that happen to be homeless. Instead of trying to stop the homeless from being a problem, we should kill the problem at its source, we should combat

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