What is your gut response to this essay?

I am truly conflicted. I do not know enough about this persons back story to feel remotely comfortable passing any kind of judgement on her or classifying her as sad a victim of circumstance. My initial reaction is utter sadness of course. The cycle of poverty is crushing her and her children. I feel her despair and loss of control. She makes her pain, suffering and grim life very vivid with her no holds barred recount of daily struggles and hopelessness. We don't know why she kept having children. Is it because sex is initially free and a brief moment of enjoyment where you can forget about your pain; reality steps out for those minutes of intimacy? Did she have a choice in her sexual intimacy? We don't know. She very well could have bent to her partners will to appease him. People sometimes tell themselves that having a child (or another child) will bring the adults closer. When in reality it often can do no more than bring on more pain, financial insecurity and frustration. Had someone cared enough to intervene in some way when she was a child her self worth and subsequent future could have been very different. One thing that is very clear to me is this, the children are the victims without a doubt. Without some kind of support and empathy from outside they are likely to be trapped in this cycle. Repeating their mothers plight. The outside judges harshly by what they see on the surface. Far too many school children are brutal to one another, a reflection of what they hear their own parents say and do to others. How many children shy away or are bullied away from the freedoms that an education can potentially offer? They are not dressed right, don't smell right and do not live in the right part of town. So what are you going to do about it?

Many authors do not have the skill to reach directly into the reader's heart. She reached mine, and I am absolutely gutted. Her spirit is being crushed by the overwhelming condition of poverty. She doesn't hold anything back about her pain and suffering, and I think that that is important in truly understanding her situation in full. And it is the children that suffer the most. They are born wide-eyed and innocent, only to be plunged into the world of politics and poverty, shunned and judged, starved and dehydrated. I am an activist for child labor, who has met with numerous organizations, former child laborers, and formed groups to fundraise and raise awareness. All this because I don't want to see these kids suffer, kids who could have had a life like me. Please check my blog out and help: http://www.onchildlabor.blogspot.com

Two feelings come to mind right away. One is sympathy for the hardship this lady goes through day after day and the lack of basic care that most of us take for granted. I am also sympathetic that she quit school to help the family but it ended up hurting her. I am also thankful for all I have and honestly how blessed I am and how I have the opportunity to help people like these. It makes one realize what's truly important in life.

My gut response is that this is truly heartbreaking, and our safety net has to be better than this. I wondered if it was a first person account or a fictional essay, so I looked it up.  Apparently it was written more than forty years ago and the author was never identified.  In that forty years I hope that we have mended the holes in the safety net. If we haven't, there is more to do. http://www.englisharticles.info/2010/06/10/what-is-poverty/

My response is that my soul has just shattered. :( I feel drained... And mentally-raped. And numb. And yet, here I am writing. In reading the essay, I feel as though I've vicariously lived though everything described, and I'm consumed by a sense of hopelessness and despair for my life and the life of my children. I'm focusing on writing this answer now, and I'm growing more aware of how words are coming forth from my finger tips as they strike against the keyboard, and finally I can feel the slow and inevitable and necessary process of cognitive disassociation taking place in my mind.  I am psychologically reestablishing that I am not her and that she is not me. I am Priyank. I want to do something. I want to reach out to this person and help her. Somewhere within me, the call to become a social worker strengthens multifold. --- Thank you so much for sharing this essay. It is painfully well-written and the language is profoundly evocative. A harrowing, gut-wrenching first person perspective on being shacked by the vice grip of poverty.

Vince Lane asked me to give my gut response to the essay by Ms. Jo Goodwin Parker.   I think a `gut response' may mean an improptu response--one that is sudden, unedited-- a reaction based  more on immediate feelings than on any distanced intellectual consideration.   (As that is how I understand it, whether or not that is what Vince means, I'll give my gut response in that way.)   Just now, Sunday of Superbowl '13, I have slept less than four hours and in the last seven hours I have attended two congregations (but sixty miles apart), each of which  work with the homeless in fellowship.   Although I regularly spend time with people who are homeless, I know no one who is in poverty in the staunch way that the purported author of that item is in poverty, and so my gut reaction is: Vince, you are invited to contact me as soon as you possibly can, so you can share with me  what you believe I can do to serve the homeless and/or end poverty. To that end you (and local readers) are encouraged to join me in service, either in my town or when I attend these nearby congregations: http://venturabuddhistcenter.org/ http://www.sfvhbt.org/    http://www.chabadsimi.org/templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/302516/jewish/About-Chabad.htm          http://www.islamicsocietysv.org/Content/ContentLinkById?contentId=930846ee-1c8d-4069-9eb1-d4afd04caa0e                  http://www.kalimandir.org/about/             http://www.saiquest.com/html/background.html         http://en.gravatar.com/guyatree    http://www.region8saicenters.org/SantaBarbara http://www.region8saicenters.org/Chatsworth http://www.region8saicenters.org/Camarillo http://www.region8saicenters.org/ThousandOaks http://www.region8saicenters.org/Ojai  http://www.uccsimi.org/pages/aboutthischurch.html http://www.beginnersmindzencenter.org/ http://pinemtnbuddhisttemple.org/  http://www.vistaprint.com/vp/ns/livepreview.aspx?alt_doc_id=HHZ12-P1A67-3J4&width=750 PS: now that I have gutted myself, I am reading up on George Henderson's 1971 book "America's Other Children: Public Schools Outside Suburbs."

My response will be short. There are no words to describe extremes including being that poor. It's depressing essay, but most depressing for people like this woman, who are aware that most likely her children won't break poverty circle and she's helpless. I'm aware that there are extremly poor people as there are extremly rich ones. It's second side of same coin. There was poverty, is, and probably will be. I can't write much more on this. I haven't got any recipe to break poverty circle or endless supply of things that poor people need, like food created from air, although I wish I had. That people definitely need help. Help that should come from 'up', economists, politicians and all other people. If many people would think on this problem, not only those trained in this field, maybe poverty could be somehow weakened. After reading this essay I feel really lucky that I'm not poor. Thank you for sharing this.

It rings of truth.  I've never been that poor, but I have known poverty of having-to-skip-the-occasional meal sort (mercifully, for a relatively short period.)   Consider that half the human race lives on $2.50/day or less.  Or that, worldwide, 34,000 children die per day of either hunger or preventable disease.   Now consider the appalling income disparity in our country which, not so very long ago, would have been considered a Third World phenomenon.   So, my gut response: we bear collective guilt and should be ashamed.

There is nothing in this essay that I like . Now, let me explain. I am an egalitarian and can not condone any developed society allowing this level of poverty to happen. The cycle of poverty is a hard one to break and I realise this. The tragedies that happen every scond of the day is an uncontrollable flood of woe. How is it possible that any developed country lets this type of story/experience perpetuate? It is understandable in undeveloped countries and the Dark Ages that people have been driven to this level of desperation and need. War and catastrophe are well known everywhere as purveyors of poverty. This is an essay after all and as such I have no reason to believe or not to believe in its actual validity. I know that this type of story is probably true and that the  facts are no out of the impossible range. It unfortuneatly feels like a script down "The Color Purple" line of films. If it is not then an enormous weight of shame and blame has to be screamed. Because there is a certain type of history in the US that has abuse as a baseline, we in other parts of the world have mostly 'created' truth from Hollywood to go by. This essay feels like created truth also.(based on fact no doubt). I do wonder if this story was written specifically to elicit a specific range of responses. If so, then it has with me. On one hand I feel enormously for Jo Goodwin Parker and those who are in the grip of similar despair. On the other I would give Jo a severe marking down for creative writing as it is a story we already have seen. The trouble is I just do not know what is real and what is not. I presume that this essay originates from the US somewhere and I feel that I understand an intention here but really, I can not give a true response without knowing more.