0 Poverty! I choose you!

So we are reading All Souls by Michael MacDonald which is a fascinating and tragic book abut his life growing up in South Boston. It centers around his family of 9 children and his single mother living in poverty and the result of that and his circumstances and the environment that they live in. Throughout the book (I finished it. I cried several times. I can't stand child death of mourning. The last few Harry Potter books killed me and continue to do so whenever I reread them), the family goes between being plagued by their poverty and reveling in it. Several people (the mother, mostly) makes questionable decisions that may have been the cause to their poverty.

This brings up the question of whether or not poverty is a choice. In the apparatus I'm typing this on, poverty is defined as the state of being extremely poor; or the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount.

There is the aged belief that poverty and bad situations are all choices and laziness. Those who still subscribe to that belief think that it is up to that person to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work hard, that the only reason you are where you are is because the effort you have put out. These are the same people who still believe in the American Dream.

I believe poverty is something more. I believe that it may be a pit trap, a place where, once you've fallen in, the walls are high and slippery and there's no a to get a grip and climb out. It's a way of thinking that you can't escape even in your dreams. Poverty is a state of being. Regardless of the choices made in the book, as wrong as some of the decisions were, a life of poverty was so engrained in them that it was all they knew and all they could go off of. Of course their choices kept them impoverished because it was all they knew. It's like a virus, or poor dictionary for your spell check. Once you misspell once and you save it into the dictionary once, you'll always spell it wrong because that's the only way you know how to spell it.

In terms of background, I come from a middle class family where we've always had enough to sleep and a bed to sleep in and amenities I probably take for granted. I've never been poor so I'm speaking with the little I know, none from experience.

The question remains that even if poverty is a trap, how does one get themselves trapped in it. I can't answer that question because its different for everyone and I don't have experience with it. The most I can assume is that it's like how I get stuck with homework assignments. You procrastinate once and then again and its fun and you joke about it with friends and then you do it again and it becomes the only thing you know and can do until your grades are in the trash and there's no more light in your life. But I'm just guessing.

0 What do we want? Integration? Are we sure?

Living in chicago, its not hard to see racial differences. I go home, I see african americans. On the way to school I pass by differebt types of people living in differebt types of places. Going to sigh a diverse school as we do, it is easy for us to believe that the entire city is as integreated and mixed as we are.

However, that is bot the case. yes, the city is varied as one might say a candy shop is. But it is not integrated fully. Just as with the candy shop, we are separated in where we live. Sour candy is by its own while the rock candy lives in aisle seven and so on. The candy in the shop may be varied but they are not mixed together like a bag of mnns or skittles. The people are the same way. Yes this city has tons of people from different backgrounds, but they are not mixed together in the peanut mnms bag of life. This is not the question, but the set up.

The question is if we actually want it that way. I don't know how many are concious of the fact that they have segregated themselves in blocks and neighborhoods and, consequently, schools.l of a single background. I don't know how much of this was a choice or just not complaining with where we are. Whatever it is, I don't think we have something against integreating our homes as much as us merely not questioning what is already the case.

Once upon a time, we were segregated. Black people weren't allowed to live in certain areas. When they were allowed to live wherever, they moved into neighborhoods which promptly drew white people out those aforementioned areas in the white flight. And then some things happened in the middle and I am writing an opinion piece, not a report. The point is, we had been separated at an early point in history and at this point,I don't think people tralize that they are continuing that separation.

We accept certain things without question. Where you live is one of them. I live in a primarily black neighborhood and I've never really questioned why it is so. My parents moved there because it was nice and affordable and they thought they could raise a daughter there, which they did. I think these are the factors that influence where we move, not who is there, although that is important. Maybe its because I'm black but I don't see people as black people and white people. There's ghetto people and bougee people and there's people who are quiet and obnoxious and fight with their spouses. These are the peoplle that influence where you move and all races have them.

So I don't think we don't want integration. I think we just don't think of what were doing as segregation. If that makes sense.