How Poverty Effects Character
The Role of Wealth in Our World
Poverty is something we all love to talk about when it comes to other people. Unfortunately, when it comes to ourselves it’s a different story. Sooner or later we find out where we stand in the social ladder in life. We find out if we have less than we thought we had or vice versa. I remember the first time I truly learned to appreciate the things that I had. Back in 8th grade I had a friend named Daniel and he lived in a mansion. After a few months of hanging out with him, I started to feel jealousy over the amount of wealth his family had. It made me so angry that Daniel lived in a mansion and I was just a regular middle class kid. What I ended up finding out though is that Daniel’s relationship with his family was pretty dry. Although his family was very rich, they had a poor communication with each other. For example, I never once in the two years I went over there had seen the family eating together. This started to open my eyes to the idea that maybe my life is far more blessed than Daniel’s on account of the fact that my family is rich with culture and love. Like Abraham Lincoln once said “Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what you think of it; the tree is the real thing” (“Character”). This made me realize that all that time I thought that Daniel had so much more than me, in reality his life was poor in a place that mine was rich. It had me thinking about my blessings. When money, the thing that people claim to love the most, is introduced into a family, it can make things more complicated and even affect their character.
In life poverty makes people tend to do desperate things in desperate situations. In “Black Hair,” Gary Soto discusses a very desperate time in his life as a seventeen-year-old runaway living on the streets. He had a job in the Valley Tire Company moving around tires. But that did not seem to help his situation because he was working like an animal for such miniscule pay.
Poverty is something we all love to talk about when it comes to other people. Unfortunately, when it comes to ourselves it’s a different story. Sooner or later we find out where we stand in the social ladder in life. We find out if we have less than we thought we had or vice versa. I remember the first time I truly learned to appreciate the things that I had. Back in 8th grade I had a friend named Daniel and he lived in a mansion. After a few months of hanging out with him, I started to feel jealousy over the amount of wealth his family had. It made me so angry that Daniel lived in a mansion and I was just a regular middle class kid. What I ended up finding out though is that Daniel’s relationship with his family was pretty dry. Although his family was very rich, they had a poor communication with each other. For example, I never once in the two years I went over there had seen the family eating together. This started to open my eyes to the idea that maybe my life is far more blessed than Daniel’s on account of the fact that my family is rich with culture and love. Like Abraham Lincoln once said “Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what you think of it; the tree is the real thing” (“Character”). This made me realize that all that time I thought that Daniel had so much more than me, in reality his life was poor in a place that mine was rich. It had me thinking about my blessings. When money, the thing that people claim to love the most, is introduced into a family, it can make things more complicated and even affect their character.
In life poverty makes people tend to do desperate things in desperate situations. In “Black Hair,” Gary Soto discusses a very desperate time in his life as a seventeen-year-old runaway living on the streets. He had a job in the Valley Tire Company moving around tires. But that did not seem to help his situation because he was working like an animal for such miniscule pay.