Personal Narrative: A Day Living On Almost Nothing In America

I did not grow up wealthy by any means, but I was always comfortable. I lived in a nice home, I was enrolled in many extracurricular activities, and I always had foot to eat. I started working while I was in high school, but my earnings were mostly for spending money as I only had small bills. While my parents were not considered rich, they were stable. As I grew up, I reaped the benefits of that stability, unaware of how many people lack resources needed to survive. The book $2.00 a Day Living on Almost Nothing in America opened my eyes to what too many people’s lives are like. As I read the book, I became more aware of the fact that I was sitting in my cozy, warm apartment. I would get up for a snack and notice my full refrigerator. I would take a bathroom break and recognize that I had running water and the soft kind of toilet paper. The more I read, the more I appreciated the things in my life that I have always considered simple, but that many only dream of. Between $2.00 a Day Living on Almost Nothing in America and the textbook, Essentials of Sociology, my narrow view of what like in America is like expanded exponentially.

From the top tier of the capitalist class to the bottom tier of the underclass, most people fall somewhere in the middle. However, $2.00 a Day Living on Almost Nothing in America illustrates the lives of specifically those in the underclass. The book certainly lined up with the textbook in that there are different classes, but the textbook seemed to make the underclass out to be a much smaller percentage. In $2.00 a Day, the abundance of people living in poverty was made much more clear. Another point that the textbook made was that deviance increases in areas of poverty, which $2.00 a Day kind of affirms. In the book, Susan lives in a poor area of Chicago, and she says that there’s “too much violence...unnecessary violence at