The Hole In The Net :: essays research papers

Our social safety net has a hole in it. The fibers of the net are decaying; the hole is getting bigger. More people are falling through, and the people with the least strength are holding the most of the weight. Three to four million Americans are homeless according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 5.5% cannot find jobs according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, and the figure is over twice that in the 20-24 year old age group, according to the Department of Education. A very slim minority of these people are sucking off the system, but the vast majority just had a bad break. Such is the story of Peter and Megan, as told by author Jonathan Kozol in his Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award winner Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Peter was a carpenter and she was a homemaker who raised their five children. They lived in a neat, working class apartment building in New York City. Peter did construction for public housing projects, and had a vast array of technical skills and tools: â€Å"I did carpentry. I painted. I could do wallpapering. I earned a living. We spent Sundays walking with our children on the beach.† It may sound like this was a happy family, living the American Dream. Perhaps they were -- they were self sufficient for all of the 12 years that they had been married, they had a steady income, a close and loving family, a home, and a chance for their children to do even better than they had done. Then the fire struck. They came racing home after hearing the news, only to find that everything had been destroyed. The children lost their pet dog and cat, Megan lost her grandmother’s china, but Peter perhaps lost the most: his tools. Since the fire, he has not had a job, because a carpenter without tools might as well not have eyes. He explained that for every job he had, he would add a new tool to his collection. But they all went up in the blaze. When Kozol first met them, they were living in a welfare hotel in New York, where they had been living for two years. They can’t get out because federal assistance programs (better known as welfare) tell them that their family limit for an apartment is $366 a month -- this with seven family members living in New York City. (In comparison, that’s about the rock bottom price for a week in a New York City one room motel.) In their two room â€Å"apartment†, the entire place is falling