Essay About Single Mother And Main Point Of His Argument

Poverty: Is There An Escape?
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Growing up, we were poor. I remember months at a time where we would have pinto
beans for dinner, and what we hoped was that my mom had enough money to make
some cornbread and enough to put some sort of pork in the beans so that tasted
okay. My mom was a waitress, had been her whole life, and still is. She would
work two jobs to try to keep food on the table, the rent paid for and her car
payment paid for, and whatever else she had to pay. It was a never-ending
battle for her to keep up. While she worked two jobs, I stayed home with my
little bother. He was only five years younger than me, so it was quite
difficult. I know now that if DSS knew, they probably would have taken us. But
I also know now that my mom did all that she could possibly do. She had no one
to help her, and she was prideful.
She always refused to ask for help, that included government help, help from
friends, and we really had no family, so help from family wasn’t an option. I
can see now that her refusal to ask for help and to take the government aid was
prideful and really hurt my brother and me in the long run. But she had her set
of values and that didn’t fall within those values, so now I completely respect
her for it. I often ask her about what her childhood was like, and it was just
like mine, her mother was a single mother after her father passed away and
waited on tables to try to stay ahead, however it was an impossible battle that
she was never able to achieve.
It was like a family legacy passed down from generation to generation, my
grandmother tells the same story of poverty. While I was growing up, I was
pretty intelligent and my mom would always talk about me doing things that were
going to make so much money, “Baby, you are going to be a lawyer someday,” or
“Mandy, I hope you become a successful engineer.” There were so many of these
lines filled in by high paying jobs that I often thought that was what I was
destined to do. But it wasn’t what God had planned for me; I always knew I was
meant to be a teacher. So I have decided to do that, but here is the question,
as a single mother, am I setting my son Rylie up to the same childhood that I
had. Are we going to have to stretch every last dime to merely pay the bills?
I know it is like that now. In order for me to go to school, I had no choice
but to rely on the system. I think my mother was a bit disappointed at first,
but there was no way I could afford five hundred dollars a week in childcare,
lord only knows how much for Rylie’s health insurance, enough food to keep us
well fed. So I swallowed my pride and did it. I know that for me it is a
short-term solution, just till December when I finally graduate and start
working. But even then, with all the student loans that I had to take out in
order to get an education and supposedly get ahead, will it ever work, or will
the family legacy be passed on to yet another generation?
All over the world, disparities between the rich and poor, even in the
wealthiest of nations is rising sharply. Fewer people are becoming increasingly
“successful” and wealthy while a disproportionately larger population is also
becoming even poorer. There are many issues involved when looking at poverty. It
is not simply enough (or correct) to say that the poor are poor due to their own
(or their government’s) bad governance and management. In fact, you could quite
easily conclude that the poor are poor because the rich are rich and have the
power to enforce trade agreements, which favor their interests more than anyone
else’s including the poor. This is a very serious problem in our society today.
Poverty is everywhere and it needs to reduce so that no more children have to
suffer.
In Why Globalization Works, Martin Wolf argues that a market-based economies
like ours here in the US, “are the basis of freedom and democracy. It
encourages valuable moral virtues.” (Wolf, 57). I just don’t see how I could
possibly agree with the main point of his argument, sure there are some of the
little points that I get and agree with, but to say that our system is working
when we have so many children here in the United States going to be hungry each
and every night is absolutely ridiculous. He bases his defense around the fact
that we are better off than we were one hundred years ago, well I should hope
so, otherwise we would have just stopped in time. Just because we are better
off, doesn’t mean there aren’t children out there being raised at an
unacceptable