After going through this weeks readings, it is easy to see why things are so hard for the “working class” and “working poor”.  Especially feeling like I am from these classes, a lot of what they say resinates with me.  In the first reading “To Poor to Make the News” it says they are trying to squeeze everyone into a single great class called the Nouveau poor, but the “already poor”, weren’t taken into consideration.  Which are said to be the 20 to 30% who struggle in the best of times, and why many Americans believe “the “economy” as a shared condition, is a fiction”.  “Nickel and Dimed” the book is a testament to the harsh realities us lower class folks have to deal with.  Effecting peoples morals and what they are willing to do to get by and sustain a so-called life.  Stories like Peg (55 years old) taking care of her disabled daughter and two grandchildren, only to fall behind on her mortgage payments because of a heart attack that caused her to miss work are heartbreaking.  Luckily she had family to help her out, but it wasn’t even a house mortgage she needed help with.  It was just a “single-wide trailer” fitting  four people.  When asked how she deals with it she says “I just stay in my room”, which I relate to especially because I have an apartment I would stay out of and me & my boy would sleep in the living room of this small two bedroom apartment.  While Setty my close friend and her mom had the two rooms but would share with other friends and or their significant other, and Setty’s mom never left the room because it was always crowded.  Figuring out who would be buying groceries for that month and if we ran out we ran out, and made do with what was left.  The less stuff we had the less time that was spent at the apartment because we had to work to feed ourselves and pay the bills, doing whatever we had to in order to make ends meet.

In this same article it says there was no room for the “so called unskilled”, with “blue collar unemployment increasing three times as fast as white collar”.  Sending all the money to the already wealthy or well-off, making it “brunt being born by the blue collar class”.  Since all focus went to middle class, wall street, and main street, even though it’s the “people on the backstreets really struggling.  Leading people to job practices like stripping to make money and going to food auctions to get food already “past sell-by date”.  Pushing people towards alternatives like becoming vegan and hunting, that may not be suitable for a pregnant women for instance.  Lose of white collar jobs also led to doubling up, tripling up, and renting to couch surfers, to make ends meet.  People don’t want to talk about their situations, making it  “hard to get firm number of overcrowding”, because we don’t acknowledge census takers, as not to get into any kind of trouble with the law or housing personal/management. Yet overcrowding is what keeps lots of families afloat, and not spending 50, 60, or even 70% of their income on rent alone.  I am really outraged at how fucked up our system is that, they make it harder for lower class persons to create a sustainable living system that would otherwise make living easier for them by making laws were the rent can be raised based solely upon how many people live within the residence.  Which is why their are lots of families that have to hide that they’re providing a living space for others because they can barely afford the price as is.  Which is the whole reason why people have to double and triple up to provide a living space for themselves.  Besides all the jobs that would be high paying jobs being sent to third world countries.

So now when we get to the second article “This is why poor people’s bad decisions make perfect sense”, we can see the mindset and what has led the lower class to act and be the way they are.  If you were to go to the ghetto or somewhere by were I grew up and lived, one could conduct random observations that would help give insist on the thought processes of lower class civilians.  Like it says in the article we understand the academic problems of poverty but don’t understand why, yet I feel any person with common knowledge could tell you that the learning experiences I and many other poverty ridden kids got is far different from those of higher class.  Which alone could be seen in how transfer kids from private schools saw the schools I went to when they transferred because of their parent’s moving for work or for cheaper/better housing that was created to kick the poor out so landowners could make more money.  Every kid that came from a private school, that I encountered would talk about how easy school, or how different it was compared to their old school, because unlike now the schools they went to had everything.  So when Bush’s law no kid left behind passed it caused kids to miss out on information and education that would push their academic mind to be better.  Unlike the private schools that were able to provide everything necessary to learning the curriculum at hand.  So us regular folk learned on the streets, what makes money, how to make money, and where to make money to better their life and their families because thats mainly what families pushed froward in their kids minds.  Leading to gang banging, drug dealing, and all around finessing of whatever was needed.  Now I’m not going to say it’s all bad because here I am writing this blog for a college course I’m taking and nothing can replace the knowledge I’ve gained on the streets, but a life like mine is not one I’d wish upon any kid.  However I am grateful for the life lessons I have gained, through the streets and sports that have kept me and many other minorities out of trouble by being the life pushed at us in order to succeed.  The funniest thing about it all is that these higher class individuals don’t even know basic essentials to living.  In college alone I have met so many people that couldn’t tell me what a washer or dryer was, how to wash clothes or dishes, how to make any sort of food, or how to be resourceful at all.  Yet we want to say these kids are smarter than me, when they couldn’t even take care of themselves; and they want to talk about equality.  Equality the hours I had to put into practicing everyday, working, and taking care of my family as a kid.  You wonder why our society is like this but it’s really space dab in your face, you just don’t want to realize it, or choose to ignore because of how separated these classes are.  Like the story told in this article their are many families that will never experience a vacation, while I have classmates that spend money like it literally grows on trees, “rest in luxury for the rich”.  You want to make someone my boss, give them all the money to see scraps when I get paid, even though people like me are the ones putting in the real work.  Sitting atop their castles, looking down on lower class civilians getting mad about “poor people recreating, but judge abortion even harder