Kozol

This article was really amazing. Well written, easy to follow and truly moving. While everyone knows the stigma on "The Bronx" in New York, I had no real knowledge of what life was like in one of the worst living conditions in America.
When Kozol described his walk with the seven year old boy, Cliffe, it seemed almost like a story from a movie. The erie feeling of "burning bodies" and thought of needles, possibly infected with AIDS or other diseases, being ready available for children to play with was overwhelming.
The other stories about the bears in the trees, David's mother, who doesn't want to go the hospital because she could be locked up or infected with TB, and more so the idea that this woman didn't qualify for government assistance because she wasn't sick enough with cancer is heart wrenching.

This author does a good job however, at not making the reader feel sympathetic over this misfortune, but angry. Angry with the state of New York for making assistance so difficult to obtain, angry at those who believe the quote he begins, and rewrites in his article about the poor being basically unmotivated. Angry that his has happened to a set group of people, Blacks and Hispanics, rather than an equal group of all different ethnicity's of people.

It clearly shows the social structural injustices that promote further and further inequalities in the world. The way this system plays back into itself, like the three letters she would need to get the assistance, that the hospital is understaffed, and that the state is constantly making their neighborhood poorer and poorer by putting unwanted and undesirable businesses and structures in it.

An upside to this article is that you see people bannign together, like those who go the the church that hte author is interviewing in. Also, that those who are addicted to drugs or prosituting to making money for food and support their children are given clean needles and condoms. Promoting the drug use isn't good, however these people will do it with or without clean needles, so it is beneficial that sterile ones available.