In “ Poverty by America,” Matthew Desmond investigates why American Poverty is so high. Written from the first-person point of view, Desmond's book focuses on answering his question of why there is so much poverty in America. He gives reasons why there’s so much poverty and what poverty means in reality, what is not being talked about, and reasons that are causing poverty, not those that everyone knows, but the ones America does not talk about.
Desmond describes a father who would stay up all night working and because of that, the father was exhausted, which led him to do cocaine mixed with benzodiazepine and morphine, just to stay awake or dull his pain. This caused him to seem like a junkie, instead of an exhausted member of America’s working poor. The authorities didn’t think the father could care for his three children alone, but the judge let him stay with the youngest. Desmond explains, “ This is what winning looks like on the tenth floor of Newark courthouse: giving up two of your children so you have a chance to raise the third alone and in poverty.”
Desmond notes that many social problems are connected to poverty
“Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social; problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.”
Desmond points out that even though we live in a country full of richness, poverty connects many social problems, so many people are facing difficulties, and are not feeling safe, which shows that we have to fix all those problems to help those in poverty.
Desmond established something that truly had me thinking. Desmond highlights, “To understand the cause of poverty, we must look beyond the poor.” This had me questioning, Are we looking beyond poverty? Are we digging to understand why there’s so much poverty? When you plant a flower, you have to dig to be able to put a seed so that the flower can grow, but you also have to check if sunlight hits the flower and give it water so that the plant can grow beautifully. That goes along with poverty because we just look at the surface, but not at the bottom, and we have to understand poverty more deeply to know the causes and the reasons to understand and be able to grow something beautiful.
Desmond points out, “Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—we the secure, the insecure, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this need less suffering?”
Desmond wants us to look around and reflect on our lives because sometimes we have so many things that others can’t have. He wants us to not only look not only at ourselves but also around us, especially at those who need help when we have the resources to help, which opened my eyes and made me realize that our comfort can sometimes make us not see those who are suffering and in need.
Desmond wrote about not only poverty but the cause why people do what they do due to poverty, which is not talked about enough, and one of these issues is addiction, which is something that happened to my brother whom I looked up to. It made me want to know why he got into drugs. I want to understand his reasons so that I can understand his point of view. The book Poverty by America is not only to learn about poverty but for us to understand and dive into the word poverty which means people, settings, life, and the world.
The center of gravity in this piece is about Desmond’s perspective on poverty. Desmond thinks it’s surprising that there is so much poverty even if America is full of richness. What inspired me to write about this was that I agree with Desmond’s perspective and I wanted to add my perspective to his ideas.
I approached the structure of my writing by talking about Desmond’s book and the reason why he wrote it so the reader would understand what I was going to be talking about, then I started to talk about a father who would do drugs to keep himself awake to work and gain money because that father’s story is really important to understand not only to understand what poverty is but the reason how poverty is affecting the country. After that, I added evidence so that the reader could understand what I was trying to say, then I started to explain in my point of view what poverty is and why I agree with Desmond. Lastly,I added more evidence to get to the point and to see how we can stop poverty, including a little part of my life.
I planned what I was going to write about, then I started looking for evidence and things that stood out to me. After that, I wrote a draft, and lastly, I added or took away things to create my final writing. The challenge that I faced in writing this piece was adding imagery because I need to improve at writing imagery. What I did to overcome it was to add imagery in at least one of my paragraphs. What I learned is that we make assumptions about people's lives without knowing their struggle because in chapter 1 he started talking about a father that would work non-stop and had to do drugs to stay awake due to poverty. What I envision for this piece as I continue working on it is to add more imagery and explain more about Matthew's prestige and also explain my perspective.