Marginalized Communities

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Rethinking Marginalized Communities: The Poor and the Homeless
For a country called "the land of the free", the United States, in its smallest units, has proliferated injustice and inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement helped bring to our attention to the reality of the 99%. For me, however, the problem is not that the rich are continually getting richer, and the poor and marginalized are continuously being exploited to serve the rich. The problem is that the presence of the poor and homeless have become so familiar people stopped thinking about them. We fail to see what the presence of marginalized communities say about us as a society – that our capacity to sleep well at night without gratitude for this luxury to lie on a bed, our ability to spend hundreds of dollars for something we don’t need, when others do not even have food on the table or roof over their heads, does not speak well of how we are shaping our humanity. Thankfully, there are people like Barbara Ascher and Barbara Ehrenreich who see the details of day-to-day life and awaken us to what we commonly ignore, that there are people who are not as fortunate as we are, and that we need to do something to help them.
Why do we help the poor and homeless? Why should we help them? These are questions that Barbara Ascher explores in her essay, and here answers as astounding "…what compels this woman to feed this man? Pity? Care? Compassion? Or does she simply want to rid her shop of his troublesome presence? If expulsion were her motivation she would not reward this arrival with gifts of food." ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Ascher", "given" : "Barbara Lazear", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "50 Essays: A Portable Anthology", "edition" : "4th ed.", "editor" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Cohen", "given" : "Samuel", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2014" ] ] }, "page" : "46-48", "publisher" : "McMillan", "title" : "On Compassion", "type" : "chapter" }, "locator" : "47", "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=6118c212-45be-4e9f-ad17-d61db19baf56" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "formattedCitation" : "(Ascher 47)", "plainTextFormattedCitation" : "(Ascher 47)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Ascher 47)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Ascher 47). For Ascher, we are capable of empathizing with our fellow because of compassion. We are capable of understanding what it means to be afflicted with poverty and madness, and it stirs in us a need to help those suffering from it. But the way consumerism and social apathy is going, it brings me to question whether we are really capable of real compassion. But Ascher is more optimistic. She says, "We cannot deny the existence of the helpless as their presence grows. It is impossible to insulate ourselves against our very doorstep" ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData"...