Essay on Jo Goodwin Parker. What Is Poverty?

Poverty, people are born into it. People can sink into its grasp, or people can escape. But it’s a hard journey. As for Kevin Powells mother growing up in the south she never saw money, for “at the age of eight in a field picking someone else’s cotton”. (p. 86) Being in poverty is based out financial needs, being poor is one thing. Poverty is just below that, for you barley have enough to get by and sometimes you are places in a setting that could risk health or safety.

Imagine coming home to a house that has no warmth or food. Constantly feeling like you are in a place you can’t get out of. This is how poverty may feel to others. The expeirences from the author Jo Goodwin Parker in the story “What Is Poverty” and the McBride family from the novel “The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute To His White Mother” show that there are various effects of living in poverty that include emotional problems, adolescent rebellion, and

Growing up poor in the Bronx and living with my mother and two siblings, I could relate to the “poverty” part of the reading On the Meaning of Plumbing and Poverty by Melanie Scheller. Scheller grew up in poverty with her mother and her siblings in rural North Carolina in the 1960s. They lived off the land in less than stellar conditions and at times in dilapidated housing which was all that her mother was able to afford.

Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth Living in Bootstrap America, tells her story of what it’s like to be working poor in America, as well as what poverty is truly like on many levels. With a thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses her journey from lower class, to sometimes middle class, to poor, and everything in between. Throughout the read, Tirado goes on to reveal why poor people make the decisions they do in a very powerful way.

There are things in this world that will never stop existing, poverty is something that has always been around, for some people it is worse than others. In “Flavio’s Home” by Gordon Parks the author gives a perfect example of what extreme poverty is like. Even though there are difficult times in life, no matter what just keep going, a little light at the end of the tunnel. Although, “Flavio’s Home” is a well written essay there is room for improvement; the quantity of personal pronouns that is used could be minimized. Those who would relate to this essay are people who have or are struggling with poverty.

In the article, “What’s So Bad about Being Poor” by Charles Murray, Murray states that “One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor”. He discusses how, contrary to present day, in America up until the 1950s those in positions of influence and power included a sizable amount of people who had been raised “dirt-poor”. Murray states that, because of this, many Americans with their lack of exposure to such people, they develop a skewed perspective of what poverty is. On account of this, Murray challenges the reader with several thought experiments which he uses to help the reader come to certain conclusions that convey his message.

In this essay “What is Poverty?”, Jo Goodwin Parker starts of with a rhetorical question “You ask me what is poverty”, this is the opening line of the essay and it encapsulates the essay ́s purpose. Through the use of the writer ́s language she also captivates the reader with the idea of poverty and what it is by making it very concrete and real. The writer wants the reader to understand what poverty is so that they can feel like they need to help not only the writer but p!eople who struggle in that situation. !

Jo Parker writing “What is Poverty?” and Gordon Parks writing “Flavio’s Home” are both stories about the dangers of poverty. I feel both authors did a very good job describing the horrors of living in poverty. Both authors show in their writing the dangers of poverty from food being scarce, disease, to having no money for health needs. Even though there were several similarities in the stories, I believe that the difference life styles of living in poverty shows the main purpose of both stories.

The Walls wear dirty clothes and doesn’t have much money to do laundry most of the time. “We loaded our dirty clothes into pillowcases and lugged them down the hill and up Stewart Street” (Walls 177). This is the first time in months they get to go to the laundromat and clean their clothes without Rex. Even though their clothes were clean other kids made fun of their living style. “‘Garbage! You live in garbage ‘cause you are garbage!’’’ (Walls 165). This describe how poor their living condition is and it hurt Jeannette, but she try to make the house more cheerful by painting the house yellow.

Poverty is a main part of life for many people in the world, more specifically the United States. Jeanette Walls displays how immense of a problem poverty is in her memoir, “The Glass Castle”, with her stories of how she grew up and her family’s struggles. How her family was treated along with what the people living around them found important unmistakably shows their economic class. The problem of food scarcity, or not having the bare necessities are some of poverty’s key problems. In “The Glass Castle”, the issues of poverty are displayed through not having the basic necessities, not being able to provide for children, and how there is not always enough food to feed everyone in the family.

Nelson Mandela once said, “Poverty is not natural it 's man-made.” This quote states that a person can overcome poverty if one has the desire to live a better life. In a novel called Poor People written by William T. Vollmann, the author travels around different countries and places to learn about poor people and to get a global perspective view. While interviewing different kinds of people, Vollmann would ask them one question: why are you poor? Looking at people 's answers Vollmann noticed that some of the people gave quite interesting answers. Vollmann went through a lot of situations where he just couldn 't imagine what life would be if he was ever to live like that. Another novel that has a similar poverty situation is called Let The Water Hold Me Down, written by Michael Spurgeon. Hank, the main character of the novel, experiences a tragic moment in his life. Losing his wife and daughter while drowning, this tragedy left him feeling like it’s all due to his miscarrying about them. His life becomes full of sorrow, and the only way out it was to go to Mexico to his friend’s place and restart his life over. In a new country of Mexico, this story takes place. Even though he had money, a house, and friends’ support, he still experienced lots of pressure trying to survive in Mexico. Poverty has different meanings in everyone 's lives but by reading these two novels, there are three similarities that can be made about people living in poverty.

Poverty is a serious dilemma in which people live in starvation, do not get educated, and have to work hard to survive, similar to what the Youngers face in the story, A Raisin in the Sun. Their situation is so bad that Ruth can’t even afford to give her own son fifty cents to take to school even after it was a requirement and not just a want. Beneatha wants to become a doctor but does not have the resources to pay for a higher education. Poverty has been a complete chaos since decades ago and sadly, is still one today. Robert Rector examined that the Census Bureau reported “a record [of] 46.2 million persons, or roughly one in seven Americans, were poor in 2010” (Rector, 1). However, comprehending poverty involves “looking behind these numbers

There is a diversity of faces and voices that define people that are currently living in poverty. If you seen them on the street would you know them? Who are these unfortunate people? Do you think you could point them out? Where do they come from? While some impoverished people are apparent -many are hidden and walk amongst us everyday, fighting to survive, playing the societal game, and hoping to rise up and leave behind a life of poverty and despair. The impoverished is made up of people from all aspects of life with differences in age, race, color, and ethnicity. This group also includes fallen power elitists; impoverished by greed or over consumption of addiction. The issues of poverty and homelessness go hand and hand. The

Imagine you had to worry about if there was going to be food on the dinner table tonight. Say you had to drop out of school to even help with providing for not only yourself, but your whole family. How do you think you would get by? The world today has been suffering for years in the money world. Especially, with some families that struggle to get their daily needs. Poverty is a problem in our society and world today and it needs to be fixed because children and adults go hungry, they are more likely to dropout of high school, and being in poverty can cause sickness and poor health.

When it comes to poverty, there is the magnitude of definitions explaining the term. The definition of poverty has important implications from point of view of policy making, politics and academic debates. Each view has its own value judgments and explanations. Over the times, new definitions have surfaced the debates and yet, there is not a single universally acceptable definition of poverty. Definitions usually set the perimeters of the terminology and often subject to limitations and criticism. According to the definition of the World Bank, the term lack refers to the scarcity of economic resources while the term inability refers to the failure of competence to take part in a community (Bellu & Liberati, 2005). It is now widely