Creative Essay: Why Are There Poor People

Creative Essay:   Why Are There Poor People


Looking back on my childhood, I realize how lucky I was to be blessed
with the family I have.   Knowing what I know now, I have come to understand that
not every kid had the same life that I had.   Not every child had a living room
full of gifts on Christmas morning, or a family to share a birthday with.   I was
lucky enough to have all of the luxuries that so many children yearn for.   So
many children take for granted the fact that they eat three meals a day, while
so many others are lucky to find a scrap of bread in a dumpster.
It wasn"t until I was about nine or ten when I realized that there were
poor people in the world.   My family and I had been on our annual trip to New
York City to see the Christmas play at Radio City.   I didn"t understand why all
these people kept asking my dad to spare them some change, or why a family was
searching through the dumpster.   I asked, "Daddy, why is that man sleeping on
the street?"
My dad spent a long time explaining to me that not everybody had the
same life as our family did.   Some kids parents didn"t have jobs to go to every
day, or cars to take them wherever they needed to go, and not every family in
the world had breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.   He told me that I was
very lucky to have all the things that I had, and that millions of kids in the
world would die to have the life I had.   I was still very confused about the
whole situation.   Why wasn"t every family like ours?   What did those people do
wrong?   My dad just said that was life . . . some people are lucky, and some
people aren"t.
At first, I   thought that all poor people were the same, but I later
found out that anybody can be poor.   Through the years, I learned that not all
people are born into poverty, that some people can become poor over time.
People can have steady jobs and eventually layoffs occur or seniority rules.
Innocent people who do their job and does it well can be knocked right out of
their...