working poor

Growing up in my household my family was not the richest we couldn’t get all the nice things other kids had but by far we were not broke, me and my brother both went to private high schools even though we had to go on work grant. My mom had a good job which supported my family because my dad was unemployed ever since he got laid off when I was in sixth grade. In the book the working poor poverty was defined in many different ways but they explained it very well, “Poverty, then, does not lend itself to easy definition. It may be absolute- an inability to buy the basic necessities. It may be relative- an inability to buy the lifestyle that prevails at the certain time and place.” By no stretch on the imagination was my family in poverty we lived in a decent neighborhood, we had 3 car, nice furniture in the house and what not. I guess it was more of a feeling for me, I went to an extremely wealthy school and it seemed like all my friends where living in a way that was normal and I was below that, discussed in the working poor also in the example of the rice bowls, if a man lived in a village where one bowl was the normal and he had two he was be considered privileged and vice versa. But at my school there was the working poor, not any of the students, none of the teachers but the janitors, landscapers and the many people working in the cafeteria. At my high school these people were treated really well because the faculty urged us to clean up after our self to make the job easier for the people cleaning up after us and a bunch of little things like that. I had a friend at the school whose mother worked in the cafeteria, he told me that the only was he could come to the school is because his mom worked at the school which allowed him to come with very little charge. He also said the people he grew up with where living total opposite lives because of what they where influenced in school and the people they where involved with. This is exactly what David Shipler was talking about when he talked about a domino effect, because kids are in bad situations they go to bad schools, get involved with the wrong crowd, to keep up with the other kids they try to get money by selling drugs or stealing, which leads to a endless spiral of bad decisions and poverty continues.