A real look into the impoverished areas of America: their drug use, prostitution, violence… and why they happen!
Written from my own personal working experience…
It takes someone who has really hardened his or her heart to integrate into some of these impoverished areas in America and serve there — because of some of the things that he or she will see and bear witness to.
You’ll see 42 year old single and abandoned woman with 5 under aged kids who suddenly contracting cancer and loosing her job along with her health insurance. Then you slowly watch her rot in her own house with colon cancer and a blockage where she cannot eat and throw up feces around her bed with her underage children watching aside of her, helplessly.
And to help her, you’ll spend almost all your income just to help ease and quicken her death to relieve her pain and the grief of children (with morphine and dehydration).
You’ll see gun violence that causes a small bar in the area — just opened with a tiny amount of saved up capital — to close down suddenly because 2 people just have been killed there. You might as well count 3 deaths. A venture capitalist’s dream (and his whole life’s saving) has just been killed as well.
You’ll witness police brutality there that you have never dreamed of, used on African Americans (by African American police force). And you see kids – probably 17 years of age — been locked up for 10 years after been caught trying to sell a bag of baking soda as cocaine.
And as the economy slips, you hear gun shots randomly at nights. Coming from words of people I know, “the n*ggers[sic] are getting more desperate by the day.” These young people, already with a criminal record, who have no chance of getting a local job, steal cars’ tires, car radios (or anything they can get their hands on) to make a living, while slowly destroying their neighborhood’s value, integrity, and solidarity to feed their basic needs.
And as you’ll see these petty crimes on the increase as the economy takes a dive, local property values in these Black Neighborhoods take a nose dive as well. People, who have lived there their whole lives, watch their full investment, slowly, but surely, turn into vapors. In the inner city, the factors that counterbalance drug use – family, employment, status within the community – often are not there. It is harder for people with nothing to say no to drugs. And as hope, optimism, and faith also fail these people there, more and more of them find assuage in alcohol and drugs, and girls, in prostitution.
You can see why such widely prevalent pattern happen in so many of America’s most impoverished communities (if you just choose to live there for a while) – just long enough to see how these people’s lives, work, and investments are slowly degraded, wasted away, and at the end, turned into zero. And you may even catch a glimpse of the justifications for their drug use and deviant behaviors. Can you honestly say, you are willing to spend your life, faithfully and lawfully, build a tower made out of cards that can be blown away at any given moment?
To get a real feel for the desperate and despondent feeling the residents of these poverty-gripped communities of America, I recommend 2 books:
- Heart of Darkness
- Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality