Poverty Debunking

JC Murray

Mrs. Parkinson

English IIIB

12 April 2016

Poverty in America

For Lars Eighner poverty wasn’t just something he experienced, but it was what he experienced every day for years. He was able to find a way to beat poverty something that is not really heard of because most people who are in poverty are okay with it and don’t attempt to get out of it. He uses many pathos in his article to show the readers how tuff his life was during this time and what he was doing to get through it.

When being homeless you have little to no money to your name. No house. No clothes. No nothing. This can be seen in the article when he said, “Except for jeans, all my clothes came from Dumpsters” (Eighner, 713). This for one shows us that he couldn’t afford clothes so he found clothes and wasn’t letting money get in the way of being clothed and warm and it also showed him trying to appeal to our emotions through showing us how he literally could only afford pants to wear and that’s it.

Eighner touched on a point I made before about money in his article when he said, “Can scroungers, then, are people who must have - small amounts of cash. These are drug addicts and winos, mostly the latter because the amounts of cash are so small” (720). Eighner in this quote basically calls out all the people who are homeless and aren’t trying to improve their own conditions and appeals to our emotions by showing us that people who are willing to go the distance will make it out of poverty and rebound into society.