Fighting the System

I hated it before when people, (usually adults with money), would say that it is easy to go get a job, live the American Dream, and not be poor. Now while this may be true for white privileged middle class citizens who have been shaped for the upper middle class and had the benefits of good schools and diligent parents, this is absolutely not true for poor black inner city kids in DC. As I said, I hated it before when adults would say that the homeless need to just get a job, now I loathe it.
Working as an investigator with the Public Defender Service, I get a glimpse everyday into the complete inequality, discrimination, and prejudice of our society, justice system, and educational system as a whole.
It sucks to be black in DC.
For example, I was talking to a woman today who was living in shit. I mean the apartment had bus crawling all over the place, she had the oven open for heat, and this woman is only 26 years old but has 4 little kids (aged 2-9). Halfway through the interview she starts crying about how her mom died, her baby's daddy isn't around, and no one gives a shit about her. Unfortunately, she is absolutely right. The government doesn't give a shit, they just push her around our inefficient welfare system, her family doesn't give a shit, they just leave or die (partly because of the ineffectiveness of our non-existent social welfare program), and whats worse is that all these four kids have it the same way. Her four kids go to a run down school right around the block, they have little to no opportunity and their only hope for the future is to turn out just like their mother.
It is sad, and even worse people bitch and moan about poverty, especially on the Hill, and don't realize that it is destroying hundreds of thousands of people literally in their back yard. This woman lives less than three miles away from the capital building. If our capital hillers would spend a fraction of the time they spend bitching about the escalation of the war in Iraq as they would talking about inequality and poverty in inner cities of the United States, real potential change could take place.