Response #3: "Someplace Like America" Introduction

The point of the book is to give a better glimpse into what our country has been like economically for the past 30 years; since the Great Depression. When first reading the introduction, it has the sort of feel of a fictional novel. Talking about stuff like homeless people being shunned in the cities they live in seems to be a bit far-fetched to be reality in today’s society. The sad thing is, it is a truth we really have to deal with and one of which becomes worse as the days go by.

I feel that our current economic situations in this country right now are ludicrous. How can the ‘greatest nation’ in the world possibly have so many problems? Easy, the corrupt bankers on Wall Street and the penny-pinching politicians that ‘run’ our country. Taxpayer bail outs and misuse of our country’s own resources are a huge problem too. Makes you wonder how our country even got out of the original Great Depression in the first place. To be quite honest, as I write this my brain is so frazzled with anger for our economic situation that I don’t even have a clear train of thought, so please bear with me.

I really enjoy the fact that the things that are wrong with America today are recognized in the introduction and will be better elaborated throughout the book. Stuff like hurricane Katrina, Wall Street bankers getting bailed out by taxpayer money, etc.; all sorts of stuff we can only hope will get better. Sad part is, it will take a long time for these things to even improve the slightest bit. This because it seems that our country is so busy fighting wars with other countries that they are too busy to fight the ones going on within our own nation.

I am very eager to hear the stories the book has that were gathered from real people. You always seem to hear the stories from the better off middle-class Americans who manage to get by all of the time; rarely do you hear about the people who are impoverished or are very close to becoming that way. These are the people that we NEED to hear from; these are the people that D.C. and Wall Street need to hear from. There is, however, no guarantee that anything will improve.

This book does seem like it is a good one, but it seems like it is one that will cause that little flame of anger and frustration to grow more and more. I know that the introduction has lit me up at least. This is a subject that many of us are all too familiar with. Personally, it makes me angry because I know there is nothing I can do to possibly make things better. There is nothing that the citizens can do as a whole. Unfortunately, it is up to the people who put us in this mess in the first place to get us out of it again. The way it’s looking, though, it won’t be for a long time.