Living the Low Wage Life-Andrew Agcaoili

I myself have never lived the low wage life. As the son of a business man and a doctor, money troubles were present, but easily overcome. I never really cared about money until the recent economic down turn and the acquisition of my first job. This job was selling knives, and I was great at it. I was making my own money for the first time and came to know the value of a dollar. As I realized that a dollar was not that much anymore, I looked around at the lives of my friends. As an eighteen-year-old, I was making more than a lot of my friend and their parents. I couldn’t believe it. I did the calculations, and not even my high paycheck could meet the minimum amount needed to live in the Bay Area.
After reading Shipler, I figured out how their lives would turn out if they stopped paying the bills, but that did not answer my question, how could they still live in the Bay Area? It turns out that many of my friend’s and even coworkers at Cutco took their job to support their families. Not only When I found that out, I felt terrible. Here I was spending all my money on useless materials, while a whole family was struggling to make it by. My best friend’s family had been on a financial decline in the years leading up to his graduation, but it had finally hit when he was off getting ready to start community college. For now, many of my friend’s plans have been put aside because of his misfortune. He spends most of his days finding work where he can get paid under the table. Usually it is favors for others and jobs from his friend’s dad’s construction company. My friend plans to pursue an education, but he does not know when.
My Proposal for a hypertext is to talk about the kids who live in poverty, and why they stay there. Kids are the future, but if most of them grow up in a cycle of pain and loss, what does that mean for our future? Kids who grow up in poverty cannot escape, even if they try hard to. They are stuck in a society where everything costs money, even a path out of poverty. Sure every once in a while, a person graduates from high school of college, but what does that really do for them? The truth is that poverty is like a monster that brings the people who once lived in it, back. It is relentless and I want my site to help other to get to know how the new generation is stuck. I want the world to know how kids, just trying to do what is right are punished for helping their families.