The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: poverty

  • The REAL Sword of Damocles

    Most of us are sort of familiar with this Greek story. The sword represents peril. It hangs by a single horse hair over Damocles’ head. All well and good. But the moral of the story is actually that people in positions of power can never rest easy in spite of their luxurious lives. They have…

  • Thirty Yards Deep

    My childhood was full of dysfunction and poverty and abuse. A lot more people can say that than we as a society would care to admit. Beneath this civilized façade is a nasty and brutish reality for many of us, and that shapes who we are. When you grow up in a really screwed up…

  • Jessica Jackley: The Most Amazing Woman You’ve Never Met

    I was looking around for amazing people to include in a future blog entry, and I thought to myself, “I wonder who founded Kiva.org? For those of you who have never heard of this wonderful organization, Kiva provides microloans to people all over the world and in turn gets those funds from people all over…

  • The Plight of Haitian-Dominicans

    It’s a small island. You’d think Haitians and Dominicans would have learned to get along by now. Not so much. In May, the Dominican Republic ruled that if you were born of Haitian parents any time after 1929 (which means, basically, all of them) you would be stripped of your Dominican citizenship and deported. Never…

  • Charity Chicken: Anti-Dignity and Ways to Counteract It

    Happy Independence Day, America! I’ve chosen to write about a topic that goes hand in hand with independence: Dignity. My mother was a single mom in an era when that was not only less acceptable, but also not as workable. Daycare wasn’t as widely available, and women were often relegated to the most menial low-paying…

  • Stuff Like This Never Happens to Me

    Rumor has it that a former coworker of mine found a bag of money on the side of the highway and came in to the office and retired the very next day. I also used to work with a nurse who won a million dollars from a McDonald’s game. She continued to work, though, which…

  • A Global Perspective. Get One.

    Well, it is looking more and more like they’re going to do away with full time positions where I work so they won’t have to provide us with health care. If that happens, I am in deep trouble. I honestly don’t know how I’ll make it. And I’m hearing that same story from more and…

  • The Cigarette Girl and the Waving Man

    I spent the first 10 years of my life in Connecticut, so when we moved to a small Southern town in the 1970’s, it was quite a culture shock. The segregation was more subtle than it had been in the 50’s, of course. We all went to school together. But we certainly didn’t live in…