Poverty in our country is very political, we don't like poor people and we view them as outcasts who only have themselves to blame for their presumed wretchedness, we watch with disdain while poor and homeless people rummage through dumpsters in search of their next meal and think: "See, they are just too dirty and lazy to get a job."
This racist stereotype flies in the the face of the fact that most of the poor in the USA are the working poor. Let's put some thought into this though, is it really their faults? Honestly, no. It is not the fault of the unfortunate working class, poverty is the resulting condition of a society that assumes everyone is given the same amount of opportunity to become successful, and if they didn't thats their own fault. In reality everyone does not have the same opportunities in the US, in many cases people are born into unfortunate circumstances such as bad neighborhoods that have bad school systems, poor nutritional resources, basically an environment with a recipe for failure. We don't have to look further than our own country to find the worst cases of social stratification, from the time that we are young we grow up with a predetermined mindset that every individual is responsible for their own success and that personal effort results in growth and prosperity, but really who are we kidding? Not everyone in the US gets to grow up in a neighborhood that has a clean environment, a good school, or grocery stores to eat healthy. When you grow up in dismal circumstances such as these, you face failure day after day and in many cases there is no encouragement or even hope to seek higher education to prosper because people do not have the financial resources to attend university. If we allow polluted neighborhoods to persist in our country we will continue to see these patterns of poverty, only when we begin to have a less individualistic mindset and create movements to enable the working class to have a voice on environmental issues will we see change.
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