Someplace like America.
This article sparked my interest from the beginning paragraph. I grew up listening to Bruce Springstein. My parents are big fans of his and even took me to a concert years ago. Though I’m not a super fan of his music, he is a very respectable artist. He has made a name for himself and is a very likeable guy. Bruce Springstein is a good voice for America. The fact that this article includes a forward by him makes it that much more interesting to me.
This piece opens with a gripping start: the death of a homeless person in Santa Barbara. Warnings were posted around the area of his death threatening other homeless individuals in hopes that they wouldn’t return. This is heartbreaking to me. These people are already faced with so many hardships. They struggle just to make it day to day, don’t they at least deserve to be left alone? Though the person who posted these fliers was unrelated the homeless person’s murder, it’s really sad to see the extent some people will go to just to express their beliefs.
A homeless person was quoted in saying, “Where do you think you are, someplace like America?” This simple question in itself really opened my eyes and made me think about how terrible things have gotten. America is thought of as the land of the free, a place with economic stability and a place where we are given every opportunity to grow and achieve. It seems more to me that America is a debt -ridden place where the cost of living is set too high, and our people are left to struggle by living paycheck to paycheck.
I like to think that most of our population is aware of the economic crisis we are facing, but I don’t think very many understand how bad things really are. This article really brought me terms with the seriousness of this crisis. Our government has been really misleading in the terms of our economic struggles. The people we have put our trust into have been lying to us; they have lead us to believe that the economic crisis isn’t a crisis at all.
The government has kept so much from us, and now the people of my generation are left to be hit the hardest by this economic failure. I think Sprinstein said it best in saying “trillions for the titan. Crumbs for the rest”, meaning that every effort to rebuild our economy has been directed towards the wealthy. The ones that needed help the least, in fact, have gained. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It seems to me that this process is completely twisted. Shouldn’t we be working towards a hapy medium rather than expanding these extremes? Many have taken pride in the fact that even with our low economy, we haven’t hit another Great Depression. This pride seems irrelevant when nothing is being done to assist the low- income Americans that were hit the hardest by our economic problems.
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