The Safety Net
Government benefit programs to assist the poor like welfare are often referred to as America’s safety net. Except by conservative politicians. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan uses imagery which encapsulates the mangling of this metaphor by calling welfare “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency.” A hammock, of course, retains the imagery of a net, but transforms it from something that catches a falling person into a thing of leisure which, it goes without saying, most poor people will never know much less use.
Fires
The author includes a quote from There, There, a novel by Tommy Orange. “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.” He uses this quote as imagery to underline the problem with how we view poverty. It is not the jumping that kills, but the small fire that grew into an inferno throughout the skyscraper. Poverty is the fire and all the physical manifestations that we see are the attempts to escape from being burned alive.
The Root of Poverty
“Trees ramify a welter of gnarled, twisting roots, and there is something to be said for tracing each one that stretches and curls through the earth.” The author uses this imagery as a comparison to trying to find the root cause of poverty. The problem has been that in following each individual root it is easy to get distracted or frustrated. Ultimately, however, the tracing of the causes poverty always comes back to the taproot from which all the others spring forth.
Looking Away
The author argues that it is plainly clear that there are many people who benefit greatly from the existence of poverty, but that there is a natural tendency to look away from this fact. “People shift in their chairs, and some respond by trying to quiet you the way mothers try to shush small children in public when they point out something that everyone sees but pretends not to — a man with one eye, a dog urinating on a car.” The comparison of benefiting from the misery of others is made equivalent with things that we don’t want to see. Imagery used here is all the more powerful because the one-eyed man and urinating dog are not nearly as gruesome as would be the sight of a person dancing on the pile of money they made from keeping people in poverty conditions.
