There’s no way in this world that I would allow myself to see my brother or my sister live on the streets. No one is born into homelessness; some have just been through a series of unfortunate events in their lives that led them to live as homeless individuals. For others, it's a case of psychological problems. No matter what family you come from, everybody is born for a reason. I believe that we all have one purpose in this life on our quest to becoming better people, and that is to take care of one another here on earth. While everyone is not perfect, we all do intend to live positively by some rules and regulations. I see so many people on the streets; some are judged by others and others just passed by them. Like Ashley Womble tells us …show more content…
She never thought someone special in her life could be as homeless as those on the streets. Until one hot summer day in 2009, Ashley tells us “My little brother Jay left his key on the coffee table and walked out of his house in West Texas to live on the streets” (68). For me, if someone left their keys, phones, or even their clothes at home, I would say that person perhaps forgot about it, or just took a short walk on the road. But for Ashley it was different, her brother was diagnosed with paranoid …show more content…
She writes, “In days that followed I spent hours with detectives, social workers and even the FBI, frantically trying to track him down” (68). She loved her brother, she wanted the best for him, but her brother believed that the conspirators of 9/11 were a group of people called “The Cahoots”, who had created a 24-hour television network to “monitor his actions and control his thoughts” (69). According to Womble, “In the year and a half that mental illness had ravaged my brother’s mind, I’d learned to lower my expectations of what his life would be like” (68). I can relate to her story because I have an uncle at home who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At times, my uncle will just talk to himself, saying he has “a business deal that he should take care of”; which he doesn't. Just as Womble tells us, “Weeks after Jay disappeared, police in Maryland found him talking to a spider and hospitalized him” (69). In the same manner, whenever my uncle took his medication which is “Divalproex Sodium”, he would have no recollection of what was said from the previous day before, however, in Womble’s case, her brother refused to take his medication. My grandmother took my uncle to a mental facility and had him admitted, but she was told my uncle should be the one to commit himself to their program. That was strange because how can a mentally ill person know how to make
The story “Unemployed and Working” from Simon Wykoff shows his conventional thinking by writing to influence readers to reimagine the stereotype of the “lazy bum” commonly given to homeless people. The author explains how homeless people work to accomplish the most important job to humans, surviving, which can be just as difficult as a conventional job. Wykoff gives his own personal testimony about the life of his homeless father and the daily struggles and process he went through. He first explains his father’s decision of not using services for homeless people, and how he coped with that while living on the streets. He then goes through each task done by his father in a day, starting with saying how there was often a good chance that something of his was stolen while he was asleep and elaborating on how his father would buy himself food if he had made enough money, but if he had not then he would have to check dumpsters to satisfy his hunger.
Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Kids :Summary In “Our Tired, Our Poor, Our kids”(2001), Anna Quindlen claims that “There are many homeless mothers and children”(332).Quindlen addresses this issue by needing to find homes for many children the past month (“thousands”) ,as well for those families that wait by their belongings until found a room to sleep. The population of homelessness people isn’t decreasing it’s increasing rapidly. She reveals these problems in order to inform people the outrages numbers of homeless families ,and also “explains some of the effects of homelessness on children,emphasizes the importance of affordable housing,and touches on the effects of welfare reform on homelessness”(329).
Homeless people are viewed as the rats and inferior people in society; often ignored and looked down upon, homeless people have the deficit of not being able to have many of the comforts in life that we may have. This is not only hurting our society morally, but it also helps us economically since there are people that aren’t buying/selling things or working. This is a major issue, since in the meanwhile, we as a society are throwing away things that still have worth or can be used. This is elaborately described in Eighner’s essay “On Dumpster Diving,” where he narrates his life of homelessness, detailing the struggling and analytical life of homelessness. During his narration, he emphasizes the fact that he has been able to survive due to
Chappie as a homeless and far away from home and without family, made me think about homelessness as a critical issue that needs to be observed. We should consider the reasons why so many people become
One of the largest issues the country is facing today is homelessness, and almost nothing is being done to stop its growth. Jeannette Walls was once a victim of being homeless and poor. She wrote about what it was like growing up poor and always on the move in her memoir entitled The Glass Castle. She tells about her experiences travelling across the country, never finding a permanent home. She often encountered obstacles such as always being hungry, being shot at, and in some cases sexually abused.
Fortunately, things are changing slowly, more communities across the country are using point in time counts to determine the number of people who are homeless on a given night, and we are also now accumulating more reliable data on shelter usage (Segaert, 2012). The systemic
It is indiscriminate and has no concern for one’s status, race, ethnicity, background, religion, and so on. Therefore the fear of homelessness is the fact that it can happen at any time.. As a result of the United States economic situation, there is a lack of jobs and livable wages provided for growing communities. The insufficient provision of financial aid is among the factors that cause homelessness. Unable to be financially independent, the homeless tend to meet their financial needs through illegal avenues. These avenues involve the interaction with drugs and
Homeless: Choice or Chance? Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle is a story of one unparalleled family who constantly is moving from one place to another. The family seeks shelter in abandoned houses in extremely slipshod conditions.
“Across the country, about 9.6 million families sThere are two major problems in our country that are being very overlooked; poverty and homelessness. They both are very common problems in America that should come to an end. There is no doubt that they can be stopped with the help of the government and other everyday people. All that needs to be done is help out with expensive housing, start initiatives for insurance, create more shelters, take more notice to the rural homelessness, and just reach out to actually understand how large this problem is.
Once I came across the issue of homelessness, I immediately knew who would be my “other” side. My older brother’s views on homelessness are completely different than mine. As Lesser (2010) stated, his views “made smoke come out of my ears”. On this issue, I believe we should help the homeless whereas my brother thinks they can help themselves.
It is hard to imagine life as a homeless family. I hope that I’ll never have to move my family from shelter to shelter as some families must do every day. According to the essay “Homeless” by Anna Quindlen, we should take more time in our lives to see the pain that homelessness creates. I agree with Anna Quindlen’s assertion that a home is everything. A home can provide certainty.
The issue of homelessness in America has been evident since the early 1600’s. Across the country men, women and children spend their nights on the streets not knowing when or if they will ever find a permanent home. States and federal officials or city councils have tried to alleviate or at least reduce the number of homeless over the last several decades at a city, state or national level but it continues to be an ongoing problem. There is a multitude of factors that account for the growing homeless population that affects each state in the country differently. Though there are many contributing factors that contribute to the amount of people living on the street at any given night in the U.S.
So even if the woman in Walnut Creek didn't have a photo of her house in her bag, she would have had other things she could have told me about her past if I had bothered to ask her rather than interrogate her. I needed to remember that while her situation is different from mine, she's a vulnerable human like me. Thinking that Quindlen's essay was about how the homeless need a place to live like anyone else, an argument with which I now agree, the point could also be made that a unique home where one can paint a room blue or red or black is just one of many things we should provide the homeless. But certainly we can only know what the homeless need if we understand them not as "nouns" but as unique people with memories and aspirations.
To Anderson, the existing articles and books on homelessness were unable to accurately touch upon the vagrancy problem in Chicago. He, on the other hand, had personal experience. The Hobo omits any direct personal accounts from Anderson, but his perspective has given him an advantage in connecting with his interview subjects and with his writing. He has since come to realize the humor in his writing a work on the hobo “getting by’ for the sake of also trying to ‘get by’ in his new Chicago student life. The Hobo is the first of his works and provided a foundation for him to develop his unique ethnographic approach that incorporates his personal experience with unstructured interviews and statistical data to paint a picture of the homeless
The authors argued that the homeless tend to be viewed and discussed primarily in terms of the problems they are thought to have (e.g., cultural deprivation, and mental disorders), the problems they are thought to pose for the larger community (e.g., crime and welfare), or the problems associated with their material survival (e.g., food, shelter, and clothing). Their inner life, the authors asserted, and particularly the problem of generating and maintaining a sense of meaning and self-worth, is rarely a matter of concern. In response to this insight, the authors researched how individuals at the bottom of status systems can generate a sense of self that can grant them with a measure of self-esteem and dignity. Their concept 'identity work' sheds light on the various ways that homeless street people construct and negotiate personal identities (Snow, Anderson,