Amazing Grace

     So I decided to read Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol and I can say hands down this is one of the saddest things I have ever read.
Kozol shares a story of his experience in a poverty ridden neighborhood in New York. 

"What is it like for children to grow up here? 
What do they think the world has done to them?
Do they believe that they are being shunned or hidden by society? If so, do they think that they deserve this?
What is it that enables some of them to pray?
When they pray, what do they say to God?"

Kozol asks these questions in hopes to get a better understanding of what it is like for a child to grow up in such terrible conditions. 
Cliffie, a seven year old that Kozol meets, gives Kozol a tour of the neighborhood. As Kozol walks and talks with Cliffie, he notices that he is a happy, friendly kid disregarding all that Cliffie has to witness and deal with. I believe Kozol realizes because of Cliffie's age and innocence, the poverty, violence and disease does not phase him. 
I think it is disgusting that these poor people have to live this way, in a place where more than 3,000 homeless families have been relocated from the city in just a few shorts years, where trucks and people come from the city to dump garbage and unwanted belongings, where a waste incinerator is placed to throw away hazardous medical supplies and materials from other hospitals, where HIV and AIDS is spreading like a wildfire, where prostitutes and drug dealers run the streets.
"Why do you want to put so many people with small children in a place with so much sickness?" Cliffie's mother asks Kozol that question and she is absolutely right to ask such a question. Why is it okay to do such horrible, unhumane things to these people?
Because they are poor and there is nothing they can do.