Friday, October 22, 2010

WHY?


A concept that has always been hard for me to understand is poverty. There is so much money in the world, so why do we have such a hard time distributing it properly? America is a sad place to live because you can see the drastic difference between the filthy rich and the dirt poor. A value of most Americans is the idea of “rags to riches” and that “you can amount to anything as long as you work hard”. Ideas like these let me know that Americans are in denial. We would like to believe that life works out like that for everyone, but in reality; it doesn’t.

Our society place values on who should have money and who will never get it. There are contradictions to becoming rich that people don’t often tell you. For example, we all have a chance to go to school and receive a quality education. Wealthy people have unlimited resources to better schools, expensive tutors, and connections to a higher society. Poor families must struggle in low income communities with bad schools, limited resources, and often cannot afford any higher education. When they settle to becoming a product of their environment; the cycle continues.

Views on poverty can often be influenced by where you are in social class. That affects our judgments because we honestly can’t tell how the next person is living. I believe in having economic mobility. But it not fair when everyone doesn’t have an equal chance, or have the same staring place. When looking at the systems in America, they patronize impoverished people, and then complain that they can do so much more rather than helping them in the first place. In order to eliminate poverty we must ask ourselves first, are we even holding each other at the same level.

3 comments:

  1. poverty has always been a problem through out the world. i agree that rich people have a much better chance in becoming successful, because of their status and their wealth. however many of them startet from scratch. like bill gates for example, he startet from nothing, he was even a high school drop out. and he became the richest man on the planet. there are many ways to earm money, all you have to do is try your hardest in everything that you do.

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  2. Yes poverty is sad and should be fixed. Money can not really be distributed because of all the rich people who like to hold onto their money and not spend it or are so money hungry they will do anything to get money even if that is cutting back on their workers even if they have no where to go and really need that job. Since the economy went through a very rough time there was many companies getting rid of workers just because they were not making enough and so money hungry. It is sad and many people went homeless because of it and we did nothing to help them. Poverty is sad and does need to be fixed but its only something that can we said and not fully fixed.

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  3. Poverty is a vicious cycle, but I don't think one should expect the wealthy to give up their money because someone didn't make it in "the world". In the states, it takes money to make money. I believe that getting your education is paramount. That's really the only way that one can pull ahead in life. But it takes money, something that people in poverty cannot afford. That's why I believe that some form of higher education should be offered for free. How can we expect people in poverty to succeed in life if we are unwilling to give them the tools to do so.

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