Writing Workshop #2, Poverty in The U.S. of A

If you just think about poverty you don't think about American. You think of Africa, Asia and South and Central America but that is not the case. Poverty is everywhere and it's just not just a certain ethnic  group of people. There is poverty throughout the world in every ethnic group of the population. This was shown in the two videos that we watched and it can open to your eyes to how bad some people live in our country. All the people that we saw had certain things in their life that was similar to the others and other things that were unique to them.

What a lot of the houses look like in Camden, NJ.

The first video we watched was about the poorest city in America, Camden, New Jersey. Fifty years ago it was one of the bigger industrial cities in America. Then there were race riots and everything seemed to change. From then on the city has been on a downward trend. The city is at an all time low right now. In Camden two in every five people live below the nation poverty rate and only 49% of kids graduate high school. That is much lower than the nations 93% graduation rate. There is also drugs and murders all throughout the city. The police can't control the drugs because they don't have enough officers. Outnumber so much that drug dealers are willing to do drug deals in the middle of the day. The murder rate in the city is incredible high also. In the past year there was 67 homicides in the city and a shooting every 33 hours.

A family and their house up in the mountains.

The second video that we watched was about the people in the middle of nowhere USA. In the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia. The people that live up in these mountains only go into town in they need something badly. The family that was highlighted in video they said that none of their family had graduated high school. They all just worked in the coal mines in the mountains. These people also had a drug problem like the people in the inter city. The only thing in the families house that they protected was their pain medication. The mom said it would sell for $10 a pill on the black market. The people up there rely on alcohol and drugs to have fun on their friday nights. Even the star high school football player said he would have a drink every night because it cleared out his kidney's and it was what he was used to growing up.

Both of the towns that we looked at were very sad and we only looked at two of them. I bet if we wanted to we could find these types of places all across the US. In the same country at CEO's of companies are getting tens of millions of dollars in bonuses. These people are never going to get out of poverty if they don't have the opportunities that others do and as of now there is no hope for them. Which is sad because you can see it in their eyes that they want out, they want to do something with their life but they are stuck on carousel with no way out. Both towns had one major thing in common though. That similarity is that drugs are a big part of people's life. If you looked at many poverty stricken places drugs would also be a major part of life.

The two videos both focused on apart of our great country that people try not to think and talk about. When really the topic of poverty should be on the front burner not the back.