Monday, March 12, 2012

The last time i saw a homeless person was in downtown LA on my way to the Central Library. When I saw the homeless i didn't really have any reaction because I usually am around downtown and there are a lot of homeless around. I didn't help the man because I have seen it far to often and now I really don't care.

In America there is a serious problem regarding poverty and homelessness. There is an average of one in every ten Americans that are in poverty or welfare. It is expected that the Americans below the poverty line are to have some sort of reason. People below the poverty line believe that it is due to drug abuse, medical bills, or there are only low paying part time jobs available for them. While people in the middle class believe that the reason for them being so poor is due to having poor education around the ghettos. All in all they both agree in the same fact that people are poor due to various reasons. There are some people that believe that the poor are not doing enough for themselves to be able to get out of that lifestyle. A man by the name of Mickey Kaus studies how the average poor person works. He mainly studied on poor black people and what caused them to stay behind while so many other black people were able to move up out of the lower class into the middle. He states that there is a lack of motivation to be able to work hard and also the use of drugs is what keeps them poor. His solution to this dilemma is to install a work ethic to the poor people. He believes in putting the lazy black youth through hard work and military style discipline paying little wage. And by cutting benefits to prevent young underprivileged mothers from getting pregnant.  Another man by the name of Christopher Awalt believes that the reason for homeless is that they are unwilling to help themselves. In some cases people don’t mind being homeless and seeing begging as a minor inconvenience in order to survive. Of course there are some exceptions due to mental illness or some guy just down on his luck but, they usually get back up on their feet in a while. He supports his argument because he worked in a soup kitchen in Austin Texas for two years and he has spoken to some of the homeless people. I do agree to some extent that homeless people are too lazy to get themselves back up but as I said before there is always exceptions.