Blog Nine
Congratulations on winning the election. In regards to the economic troubles of the working poor, particularly poor working mothers, there is lots of work to be done. Part of the biggest problem is that poverty is a cycle that is difficult to get out of. People often times make the assumptions that this is because the poor are lazy and poor mothers are inadequate, while this is often not the case. Many of these mothers get caught by asking for help from the government (Appell). We should not reward them by taking away their children when they are trying to change. It is unfair to label a woman as a bad mother because she does not have the economic means to provide for her children what a good mother could.
A particularly useful book, “The Second Shift,� demonstrates how hard women usually work for their families. If opportunities are given for these women to earn money and care for their families, they will do it. A lot of the trouble is that there are no opportunities or opportunities with a definite ceiling in poor areas. Simply providing these people with money is not going to work, and it perpetuates the stereotype they are lazy. Instead, more work should be done to provide better education and employment opportunities in these areas. One possibility is taking the model of “education-to-work� school from Japan (What We Can Do for the Working Poor), which trains students to be good employees and hold a job. However, this should be a means to accessing more opportunities, not an end.
A big problem, in my opinion, is that our American system needs people to do the grunt work, and we are unwilling to provide opportunities for our grunt workers because we know that other positions are more desirable. But it is unfair for us to make these positions un-livable. When people cannot provide basic needs to their families, we cannot expect them to be good parents. More needs to be done to raise the standards of living in these impoverished areas in the United States, and we need to allow these people access to other options, should they choose to work towards them.