Defense Paper

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Defense Paper
By Hao Djur
Everyone makes choices on a daily basis whether it’s for oneself or
their family. The individuals who have very little money to spare have to be
critical when deciding which choices are a top priority. Their choices include
housing, healthcare, food, transportation, technology and grocery shopping.
Individuals living in poverty and homelessness raise a special concern in our
community because they lack not just money, but food and support as well.
According to bls.gov, there are 8.6 million unemployed people in the United
States,1 and there is an estimate of 3.5 million homeless Americans.2 These
two specific statistics reveal that a large portion of Americans are not
earning enough, and therefore are unable to afford housing. When these
individual’s housing and jobs start to disappear, their welfare does as well.
The challenges that the unemployed are facing cannot be ignored and as
middle-class citizens we cannot abandon the forgotten ones.
The US welfare program was created to help provide assistance to
families with no or little income during the Great Depression. After the
Welfare system was initiated many began to complain that some individuals
were abusing the program by not looking for work, which made it a huge
topic. A case worker must be assigned to someone who is applying for
1 “THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION—MARCH 2015.” Bureau of Labor Statistics U.S.
Department of Labor. Accessed April 4, 2015.
2 “Fact Sheet.” Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition. April 8, 2014. Accessed April
4, 2015.

welfare to gather information such as family size, income, and any crisis
situation to determine an individual’s eligibility.3 Taking this into
consideration, are the ones who use the welfare given to them not applying
for jobs to receive more aid from the government? The answer is not
concrete because our community is filled with decent and also selfish people.
To show the challenges of unemployment and homelessness, I wanted
to create a scrapbook to share two diverse childhoods of boys named Kyle
and Joe. Both of them were born to middle-class parents, but Joe’s family
experienced homelessness, whereas Kyle never had to worry about the
issue. Each page shows the gifts and what each character was and is going
to do on their birthday. When the scrapbook is opened, the left page portrays
Joe’s birthday experiences, while the pages on the right side represents
Kyles’s birthday celebrations. My scrapbook includes when both boys turned
five, twelve, sixteen, eighteen and twenty. In addition, I wanted to put their
thirtieth birthday to show how they would be spending their special day. I
chose to start at age five because it is an important age since most children
start to their first year of school. Twelve is the last age before becoming an
official teen and that is an important time for many children. I included a
sweet sixteen because it is very well known. Turning eighteen is another
critical age because it’s a transition from a teenager to a young adult. And
since my audience for my Inquiry Product is college students, I thought it
would be best to have age twenty. At the very end, I wanted my audience to
3 "US Welfare System - Help for US Citizens." US Welfare System - Help for US
Citizens. Accessed April 27, 2015. http://www.welfareinfo.org/.

see a birthday where both Joe and Kyle will celebrate the day together. No
one really thinks about how fortunate they are to be part of the middle-class
or the struggles and hardships of people living in poverty and homelessness
when they have nothing to support themselves. This is my main reason for
creating my genre, which was to make college students more aware of their
privileges and challenges that many people have to endure on a daily basis.
On Kyle’s birthdays he was always surrounded by many close family
members and friends who gave him tremendous amount of gifts. His father,
who was a family physician and his mother who worked as a high school
teacher could afford Kyle all the presents he desired.
On the other hand, Joe experienced a much different childhood than
Kyle. At age five Joe’s father lost his position as an accountant at Wells Fargo,
while his mother worked as a nurse at their local hospital. After his father lost
his job, it caused his family to start becoming financially unstable and his
parents could not afford to throw him a huge birthday party. Instead they
tried their best to give him a small celebration with just the three of them
and his parents even baked Joe a homemade birthday cake. Seeing that his
parents try to make the best of their situation, Joe grows up to be a humble
man. And since Joe was starting his first school year, his parents managed to
give him new clothes. As for Joe’s father, he struggled to find work after
being laid off.
Not being able to find a replacement job after losing one makes it
difficult to find employment in the future. Janelle Jones, a researcher at the

Center for Economic and Policy Research believes there is a discrimination
against the unemployed. In an article, she said, “The longer you are
unemployed, the harder it is to get another job, and as you’re waiting, your
skills are deteriorating, [and] the labor market moves along without you.”

4

Her statement shows that the long-termed unemployed, which are
individuals who have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer, face a challenge
where they are victimized. The longer someone stays unemployed it makes it
harder for them to be hired because employers want to hire someone who is
up to date with their skills. Joe and his father went through situational
poverty (living in poverty due to a crisis in Joe’s case it was unemployment)
and it caused Joe’s father to struggle with finding employment. The longer
his father couldn’t find a job, the tougher it became for him to provide for his
family. This was a reason why Joe didn’t have many birthday gifts growing
up.
After Joe’s father was laid off his job the family soon experienced
another crisis. Joe’s mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her
diagnosis forced her to get immediate medical treatment. Then the year Joe
turned twelve, he went through another hardship where he lost his mother to
cancer. While struggling with both unemployment and not having the money
to pay for his mother’s hospital bills, Joe and his father lost their home and
became homeless. The scrapbook was supposed to give an insight into the
difficulties Joe faced. Although all these crises should have brought him
4 Fortino, Ellyn. “Progress Illinois.” Long-Term Unemployed Face Continued Economic
Challenges. May 28, 2013. Accessed March 31, 2015.

down, Joe turned out to be an appreciative person because of his humble
parents.
One of the barriers faced by unemployed individuals is that most job
applications are found online. To find employment, most jobs now require
access to online applications according to a Cheri Honkala a Poor People’s
Economic Human Rights Campaign advocate. The availability of technologies
such as computers are hard to gain access to when someone is homeless,
but prevents individuals from finding employment and applying for them. Not
having a device to gain access to an online job application made it harder for
Joe’s father and other unemployed individuals to obtain work.
In another article I stumbled upon, an unemployed worker advocate,
Mitchell Hirsch, gave his view on a barrier he found that many unemployed
individuals sometimes go through. He said that having to go through preemployment screening, which mandates looking at a potential employee’s
credit history is a barrier.5 When an individual has a poor credit history and is
also seeking employment, then they are unlikely to secure a job because of
their poor credit, and cannot escape their debt. They also cannot escape
their debt and improve their credit since they are not able to find work. One
way to eliminate this particular barrier is the initiation of the employment
act, intro 261, which prohibits the checking of personal credit history in
employment. Most employers look into a job-seeker’s credit history, but yet
5 Traub, Amy. "Why New York Needs The Stop Credit Discrimination in Employment
Act." Why New York Needs The Stop Credit Discrimination in Employment Act.
September 10, 2014. Accessed April 27, 2015.

there is no proven link between the performance of a job and someone’s
credit report. Overall, this article wants to stop the examination of personal
credit histories, to ensure a fair access to job opportunities.
Joe’s story revealed that homelessness can affect anyone. Really. It
could happen to our friends or family members one day. It is to the
community’s benefit to support the ones currently struggling with
unemployment and want to transition out of poverty and homelessness. One
thing the middle-class should consider is being aware that the unemployed
are not all lazy and find ways to help these individuals.
The experiences that each one of us go through impact us in different
ways. But, the most important thing to remember is that unemployment and
homelessness are crucial issues that need to be made aware of. Many
unemployed people are seen as lazy and abusing welfare aid, but there are
many factors that prevent them from finding work, which unfortunately can
lead to homelessness.
From the research about my topic, I realized that the most important
aspect that many unemployed and homeless individuals lack is support from
their community. For the last page of my scrapbook I made a page dedicated
to Joe and Kyle’s thirtieth birthday. Although Kyle was spoiled his whole life, I
didn’t want his privileges to make him a selfish man. I have learned that our
privileges are given to us and we have no control over them. I also wanted to
make Kyle a guy who used his spare time to give back to his community by
volunteering. Somehow their paths meet and the two become friends. I met

a guy named Joe who went through a similar childhood like Joe’s character. I
have no clue how his future will turn out, but I want it to be full of happy
birthday celebrations and the last page shows that he will.

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