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Poverty and its impact on society
Poverty and its impact on society
Introduction to poverty
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Poverty is a difficult and horrible way to grow up in life. It causes people to become stressed, and terrified of the world. It also demonstrates the ugly side of the world. When you ae in poverty. It causes people to become desperate and do horrendous things like murder, rape, and prostitution. But poverty can also produce strong, determined, and hopeful humans. In Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus by Carolina Maria de Jesus, we see the ambitious mother of three living the daily struggle of living in the poor favelas in Brazil. She provides the best life she can to her kids, while also perusing her dream of becoming a writer. In Testimony: Death of a Guatemala City by Victor Montejo, the readers follow the inspirational …show more content…
They are called favelas, and they are shanty towns where there is limited amount of resources. Carolina is there making a living of getting cruzeiros to provide food for her children. The biggest difficulty for Carolina is hunger. Hunger is a big role in the diary because some days she eats and some days her family has to starve or dig in the garbage to get food. In her diary, Carolina states, “Yesterday I ate that macaroni from the garbage with fear of death…” (de Jesus 31). Hunger is a reoccurring issue living in the favelas. She always tries to deliver and provide food for her children, but some days it is not accessible. She constantly has to wonder if she will be able to obtain food for her family. It is truly a rigorous battle of finding food in the …show more content…
Living in poverty brings high tensions and people tend to lose it. The use of alcohol is a contributor of the excess violence in the favelas. Many men and women begin to fight about the littlest thing, but it expands to a large issue as a result of the alcohol. Carolina recounts whenever a fight breaks out, “I was giving lunch when Vera came to tell me there was a fight in the favela” (de Jesus 63). These incredibly common vicious fights are entertainments to people living in the favelas. It is so familiar that whenever a fight breaks out people just enjoy it as if it were a show. As Carolina being the great hero she is, she regularly breaks up the
Throughout the last sixteen chapters of the novel Maria describes how Carter and Helene visit her in a Neuropsychiatric facility and lets us, the readers know what happened in the desert. In chapter sixty-nine Carter asks Maria not to come to the set because her presence makes his new lover (Susannah Wood) nervous. The town they (the crew: Carter, Susannah, BZ, Helene, Harrison Porter, and Maria) were in was between Death Valley and the Nevada line. No one thought of as a town at all, only Maria did. She thought so, because the town was bigger than Silver Wells and had a motel, two gas stations, fresh meat and vegetables store, a Pentecostal church, and the bar that served only beer. Also, there was a bathhouse, which attracted elderly to the town. A major drawback of the town was that with the temperatures as high as 120- 130 the conditioners did not work. In the next chapter Maria asked Carter whether he liked having sex with Susannah. His response was that he did not particularly enjoy it. After that all of the crew members except Maria drove to Las Vegas. There, Susannah was beaten up in a room by Harrison Porter. In the same chapter (72) BZ reveals to Maria that Carter and Helene had been sleeping together. When Carter asked Maria what did she want her response was “I
For this assignment I decided to read the book Code of the Street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city by Elijah Anderson. This book is about how inner city people live and try and survive by living with the code of the streets. The code of the streets is basically morals and values that these people have. Most of the time it is the way they need to act to survive. Continuing on within this book review I am going to discuss the main points and arguments that Anderson portrays within the book. The main points that the book has, goes along with the chapters. These points consist of Street and decent families, respect, drugs violence, street crime, decent daddy, the mating game, black inner city grandmother. Now within these points there are a few main arguments that I would like to point out. The first argument is the belief that you will need to accept the street code to get through life. The other one is the belief that people on the street need “juice”. For the rest of this paper we will be looking at each one of main points and arguments by going through each chapter and discussing it.
The notion of poverty has a very expanded meaning. Although all three stories use poverty as their theme, each interprets it differently. Consequently, it does not necessarily mean the state of extreme misery that has been described in ?Everyday Use?. As Carver points out, poverty may refer to poverty of one?s mind, which is caused primarily by the lack of education and stereotyped personality. Finally, poverty may reflect the hopelessness of one?s mind. Realizing that no bright future awaits them, Harlem kids find no sense in their lives. Unfortunately, the satisfaction of realizing their full potential does not derive from achieving standards that are unachievable by others. Instead, it arises uniquely from denigrating others, as the only way to be higher than someone is to put this person lower than you.
Throughout the article “The Code of the Streets,” Elijah Anderson explains the differences between “decent” and “street” people that can be applied to the approaches of social control, labeling, and social conflict theories when talking about the violence among inner cities due to cultural adaptations.
In the novel Poor People, written by William T. Vollmann asks random individuals if they believe they are poor and why some people are poor and others rich. With the help of native guides and translators, and in some cases their family members, they describe what they feel. He depicts people residing in poverty with individual interviews from all over earth. Vollmann’s story narrates their own individual lives, the situations that surround them, and their personal responses to his questions. The responses to his questions range from religious beliefs that the individual who is poor is paying for their past sins from a previous life and to the rational answer that they cannot work. The way these individuals live their life while being in poverty
In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, there is an emphasizes on how rough it is to be part of the low economic class . Through her words you can create an image about the way poverty affects children. She goes through the book making great remarks on the topic. The different experiences that Esperanza goes through have a lot to connect with her family's financial status. She specifically describes her feelings about the poverty they live in through three of her short stories. The three short stories in which poverty seems to be an obstacle are The House on Mango Street, Our Good Day, and Chanclas. When the book begins the downgrading of Esperanza's esteem begins with it.
The Liz Murray’s lecture has far exceeds my expectation. She did a wonderful job with the book, but I think it was even more meaningful being able to listen to the author articulating her own story. Breaking Night and the lecture provide me with lots of valuable insights about life. I knew that poverty was a global epidemic, but I would have never thought that it would affect people in our country to that extent. Originally coming from a relatively undeveloped country myself, I am not too unfamiliar with the concept of poverty. I could not agree more when Liz Murray mentioned how poverty acts like a wall separating people in society. I think poverty in itself affects both the body and the mind. The body is deprived of its basic needs while the mind is
However, she never really experienced the actual life of living in poverty as the majority of people living in poverty experience. Barbara, an educated white women had just that on other people living in poverty, because of the color of her skin and education level that is more often than not restricted from people living in poverty. She was able and more qualified for jobs than other people living amongst the status she was playing. She also was able to more readily seek better benefits than people living in poverty. When she first start her journey in Florida she had a car, a car that in most cases people living in poverty do not have. She was also able to use the internet to find local jobs and available housing in the area that many people living in poverty are restricted from. Another great benefit she had was the luxury of affording a drug detox cleansing her of drugs deemed bad. Many people living in poverty do not have much extra cash laying around much less fifty dollars to afford a detox for prescription drugs. She also had the luxury to afford her prescription drugs, another option that many people living in poverty do not have. Another element that made Barbara’s experience not that genuine was the fact that she was not providing for anybody other than herself. Twenty-two percent of kids under the age of 18 are living below the poverty line (http://npc.umich.edu/poverty/#5) , Barbara did not have to provide for pets or kids which would of changed her experience altogether of living in poverty. Not to belittle Barbara’s experience, but many factors of what life is like living in poverty were not taken into consideration during her
In the favela of São Paulo, Brazil, 1958, Carolina Maria de Jesus rewrote the words of a famous poet, “In this era it is necessary to say: ‘Cry, child. Life is bitter,’” (de Jesus 27). Her sentiments reflected the cruel truth of the favelas, the location where the city’s impoverished inhabited small shacks. Because of housing developments, poor families were pushed to the outskirts of the city into shanty towns. Within the favelas, the infant mortality rate was high, there was no indoor plumbing or electricity, drug lords were governing forces, drug addiction was rampant, and people were starving to death. Child of the Dark, a diary written by Carolina Maria de Jesus from 1955 to 1960, provides a unique view from inside Brazil’s favelas, discussing the perceptions of good
In ‘City of God’, Meirelles is attempting to highlight the issues surrounding life in the favelas and the impact that poverty and crime is having on individuals, and ultimately the country as a whole, through his use of themes such as poverty. Similarly, Kassovitz is attempting to highlight the social division between authoritarian
Poverty is a potential outcome for everyone. It’s sneaky and many people fall victim to it every year. No one believes that they have the potential to fall into debt, but it can happen through a string of bad luck, time running short, and other possibilities that can’t be controlled. People who are struggling with difficulty believe that there is no way out because no one will help them. However, there are ways for us, as a society, to help those who are short on income receive the help that they need. Many of the impoverished are thought to be slackers, addicts, or self-destructive to their lives. Society can help each other by dismembering the stereotypes given to people who are underneath the “Poverty Line” that they used as wedges between the classes. Labels given to those who’re poor have nothing to do with who they are as humans.
Poverty is a tremendous problem in the United States. Unfortunately, many of the families who are living in poverty have much more difficulty finding good jobs than those who are not. In The Working Poor, by David Shipler, there are many different circumstances that cause people to get to that point. Many of those in poverty have too many barriers in their way for them to be able to rise above the poverty line and support themselves. Some circumstances that cannot be avoided like disabilities or being born into a poor household can create biases that make it more difficult to get employment. Seeing what causes many to become impoverished and how some people were able to rise above the poverty line may be beneficial to others and possibly prevent
What is poverty? What do we think the real definition of poverty is? As humans, we always complain about the small things in life, but what about the people who live in Peña Blanca? What do they have to say about their daily struggles just to earn a simple grain of rice? As some people say, poverty is a beast that cannot be beaten. The people of Peña Blanca suffer from extreme poverty, and yet, they are willing to give or offer anything to the people in urgent need or need help, which what instantly caught my attention. Their generosity was unexplainable. An example of this in the movie is when a man reported that his wife is going to die because he doesn't have enough money to pay for medicine since she’s extremely bedridden, and then Anthony, a fellow neighbor, offered his money to pay for the medicine, even though that would affect him negatively since his family are also extremely poor . Poverty has played a major role in these people’s lives, making everything a challenge.
When one hears poverty they think of having no money or a house and being on the streets like a homeless person. That is in fact true but, poverty is more than that it is more widespread across income levels. Not just those at the absolute bottom of income earned and wages. 12% of Americans are unable to meet their basic needs 20% being 18 years or younger (mit.edu). Poverty does not just affect people on the individual level it also can have effects on communities as a whole.
In conclusion, sometimes actions take place that changes a person’s outlook on life and as you can see poverty is one that can have a huge effect on not only one person, but also the people around him/ her.