Post #1

Post #1
Amazing Grace By Kozol

Quotes
1. "They say she gets a number," she replies.  "City don't have the money for the living.  I guess they think: why waste it on the dead." p.20
I thought this quote meant that the city doesn't care about the people that are poor and need help to live in houses and to stay helahty.  They believe many people are just a number and that they don't deserve the respect that the wealthy get.  Its the same thing in big schools many times you are only a number and there is no name associated with you. 

2."Evil exists," he says, not flinching at the word.  "I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher could call evil.  Somebody had power.  Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people- that is my idea of evil." p.24
When I read this quote I thought a lot about Johnson and his piece with white privilege.  I believe that many people don't know that they have this white privilege and this power over people.   There also other people who know that they have this power but don't want to help anyone else but themselves.  I think this was a main point of Kovac's piece that many people know that the poor need to be taken care of and that the hospitals that they go to are not up to standard but nobody in power does anything to fix it.  They are left to their own means and that doesn't allow many people to get very far in a white privileged society.

3. "I believe that we were put here for a purpose, but these people in the streets can't see a purpose.  There's a whole world out there if you know it's there, if you can see it.  But they're in a cage.  They cannot see." p.24
When Kovac talks about the prostitutes and the drug dealers in his piece I feel like this quote somes up how he feels that they might feel that they don't know anything else they were brought up in this culture and don't see anything besides sex or drugs.  They are stuck in the cage that he is talking about and unable to leave because of the white privilege that exists around them and that it is very hard to get out of something that you are so used to.

Questions:
What did everyone else think of this piece?  In my WMST's class we read another piece by Kovac and he wrote that from almost an interview type of writing just like this one was and I found it to be really easy to follow and more interesting than other pieces.  I found it easier to read than White Privilege.  I thought Kovac had a good point about how many poor people lose out on many basic things such as healthcare and even being buried because many wealthy people don't care to help them out.