Talking Points #1

Jonathan Kozol - Amazing Grace

This article is about a man from a high middle class society in New York who Kozol says lives in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation and travels to South Bronx, which is the poorest. There, he is informed on all the dangers that people go through everyday on their struggle to survive. It also relates to various other topics, including...
-Money Matters
-Drugs
-Children
-Survival
-Safety
-Disease
-Poorness
-Race
-Education
-Dangers
-Pollution

Kozol argues that you don't have to be irrational to end up less fortunate.
There is evidence that the author uses to support the argument.
1."On a hot night like tonight, everyone there is outside on the stoop because nobody has a fan. You know it's dangerous to do it but you got to go outside. You either go outside and take your chance or else you roast inside the house" This shows how poor every household is if they cannot afford a fan, and how high the crime level must be if it's a danger to sit outside your own house.
2. "Depression is common among children in Mott Haven. Many cry a great deal but cannot explain exactly why. Fear and anxiety and common. Many cannot sleep" This statement suggest the fact that children are almost always suffering, and to say that children themselves are to blame for their own heartbreak is illogical.
3. "Over 4,000 heroin injectors, many of whom are HIV infected live here. One quarter of the woman of Mott Haven who are tested in obstetric wards are positive for HIV. Rates of pediatric AIDS, therefore, are high." There is such a high rate of disease and it only continues to spread.

This article was very overwhelming to read. Its difficult to sit in my own desk in a sheltered room and a fridge full of food and complain about little things, it almost makes me feel guilty but above all it makes me realize how blessed i have been for always having a roof over my head. I'm not sure exactly if Allan G Johnson would agree with everything Kozol said or not. Johnson has once wrote "Treating people with disabilities as if they were invisible, designing buildings as if everyone was non disabled, seeing people with disabilities as inferior or abnormal, even less than human.” I believe that Kozol would agree with his statement because it seems as though people or high authority do not care about the South Bronx. Even though not all of them are disabled, they are still over 95 percent poor and to some people, that makes them different. They don't have to live their so it doesn't concern them and probably never will. The hospital described in this piece sounds disease infected and unbelievably polluted. Jonathan Kozol All together has spent over a hundred hours talking to a resident of this town. Someone who has worked hard all her life and continues to struggle everyday. She does not deserve the things she has to put up with and neither do a lot of other people who are forced to live there just because they basically have no other choice and no chance to change it.