Poverty: A Dangerous Epidemic

by Rachel McGovern

First Year Writing Awards

Second Place (Tie), Category: Style

I have witnessed the effects of poverty firsthand. Seen homeless men and women sleeping in the crooks of buildings to avoid the cold. Seen my friends put themselves through enormous amounts of debt to receive an education that has become necessary in today's workforce. Seen my own mother struggle to find us places to live with rent skyrocketing as minimum wage slowly goes up cent by cent. These experiences instilled in me the belief that everyone deserves the right to be able to provide for themselves. A right that can be achieved through, at the very least, raising the minimum wage across the United States.

Like many teenagers I joined the workforce at sixteen. My parents, who were already struggling financially to keep us afloat, wanted me to be able to make my own money. This was not only to save for college, which is where more than half of my paycheck went, but also to give me pocket money. Money which would allow me to have different experiences with my friends. Experiences, such as going to theme parks, which my parents couldn’t afford to put any spare money towards. If I wanted to go out, I needed to provide money for myself.

Since joining the working world, I have watched my fair share of coworkers drive themselves to exhaustion to make enough money to feed their families. In doing so they had to forfeit valuable time with their children and spouses. Time which they can never get back. In one case, I watched a woman work ten-hours a day, so that she could be considered a full-time employee, working forty-hours a week. She believed it better to work ten hours a day and have the rest of the week for her kids, than to have to work day after day, night after night. She put herself through this torturous experience just so that she may be able to spend time with her daughter and infant son. I watched her stumble through work exhausted after an unsleeping night of her son sick in her arms, yet she still had hours to go before she could even take a break. I watched as these human beings hoped desperately for a raise. Instead, they were threatened with unemployment. There is no job security in the U.S. Not when thousands of people are willing to take your place, even at the risk of taking less pay if it means sustaining their families. Through all this dread and desperation, I watched as the government feigned an interest in the plight of the working class while giving us pennies each month.

Yet my belief in the rights of workers and the rights of a fair minimum wage hadn’t yet developed in my sixteen-year-old brain. I hadn’t been able to take in the gravity of how underpaid and struggling everyone in the workforce really was. Like many teenagers I was focused on my own struggles. It wasn’t until senior year of high school that the steadily growing homeless population in my town finally affected me personally. That experience was enough to finally shift my point of view. There was a real problem that I’d been oblivious to. It’s true that people don’t realize a problem until it comes and hits them in the face.

The day that hit me in the face was just like any other. It was hot and sweaty, the middle of an August heatwave, but anticipation hung tantalizingly in the air. It was the day of my high school’s Senior Scavenger Hunt, and my group was feeling excited, happy, and competitive. The first task was to “Act out a scene from a movie.” We had decided to try our hand at Jack’s iconic scene at the bow of the Titanic, and so we climbed up the steps of the town gazebo to get our shot.

The last thing we expected was to get bombarded with a flurry of hate-filled comments. A group of homeless men and women (the number had been steadily growing in our town), was curled up inside the Gazebo. They were rude and we were scared. But perhaps it was the other way around. Still, we were four teenage girls, and they were three full grown adults. So, we quickly left the group behind and shot our scene somewhere else. The experience rattled us, but my group continued the rest of the day, forgetting it soon enough. Yet I couldn’t seem to get that interaction out of my head. Maybe my town wasn’t what I thought it was. Or in a bigger context maybe the United States wasn’t what I thought it was. The more I thought about the people, huddled together under a clump of ratty blankets, their few belongings scattered across the gazebo floor, the more I felt bad for their situation and angry that there was no way to change it. I began to notice the homeless population around town more and more. A man dragging his sleeping bag down the street, another squished under the awning of a closed down shop. These people were stuck in an endless cycle. They could try to apply for a job, but someone more “qualified” or “professional” would inevitably be picked over them. Even if they were able to get a job, there was no way they could support rent with the pay they would receive. In the end they were truly stuck, and I felt helpless.

I’ve felt this same helplessness within my own family. My mother worked as a waitress for a long time because despite the abhorrent lack of pay, at least the tips she made would make up for it. Did you know that the average hourly wage of a waitress is ranged between $7.34 and $9.73 (Salary.com, 2022)? Nearly half the national minimum wage. Even with tips the average rent for a standard apartment in Massachusetts is around $1,700 to $2,000 (Josephson, 2019). Now consider she is a single mother providing for her child while also needing to pay for food, clothes, and medicine. All things considered; it is virtually impossible to live off being a waitress. As a child I could tell she held a burden, from the dark circles under her eyes to the exhaustion in her steps, but I couldn’t yet process what it was or even if I could help. Yet she still made sure that I had the best childhood she could provide. She worked herself to the bone in a system that couldn’t care less about the plight of the working class.

We had to move out of my childhood home when I was five years old, the cost of it too much to bear. I blamed my parents, but the reality was the cost of living just kept going up. Since then, I have moved out of three separate homes. Each decision based only on the factor of money. I have watched as neighborhoods shifted and changed. I have been through one ratty apartment to the next because the only way the rent is cheap is if there's mold growing on the ceiling or roaches in the cabinets. If my family could only afford apartments that were falling apart, then what did that say about the chances of the homeless population? While others may be quick to blame homeless people for their plight, I find that I can’t. No matter what the circumstances may be. It is impossible to blame them. Not when I see everyone around me struggling to provide for themselves every day. I have seen what it's like to live on the poverty line. I am thankful every day that I am not living on the streets. I am thankful that these experiences have instilled in me new beliefs. They instilled in me the idea that everyone deserves financial security, everyone deserves the ability to provide for themselves, and at the very least everyone deserves a livable minimum wage.

This belief is not new by any means. People have been fighting for a higher minimum wage since the 1930s (Kiger, 2019). We believe in equality among all people and yet the gap between the rich and the poor is only widening. But I have not given up hope. I still believe the American workforce can be fixed and one way to start that revolution is by raising the national minimum wage. A minimum wage that needs to keep rising until a mother can house her child, until a human being can keep themselves off the street, until teenagers fresh out of high school aren’t forced to start their adult lives in debt.

References

Josephson, A. (2019, July 10). The cost of living in Boston. SmartAsset. Retrieved May 4, 2022, from https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-cost-of-living-in-boston Kiger, P. J. (2019, October 18).

Minimum wage in America: A timeline. HISTORY. Retrieved May 4, 2022, from https://www.history.com/news/minimum-wage-america-timeline Site built by: Salary.com. (n.d.). (2022, April 26).

Hourly wage for Waitress. Salary.Com. Retrieved May 4, 2022