America, Home of the....Homeless

In the excerpt “America’s Wandering Families” by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel, the growing concern of starvation and homelessness in America is highlighted through not only statistics, but also real life accounts and the author’s interpretations. As stated in the introduction, many Americans believes that “nobody starves” in the United States. Schwartz-Nobel uses this excerpt to blatantly bring forth the issues of poverty and hunger to the middle-class/ upper-class citizens of America. That is her audience because she wants the people of America, who have the ability to help change some statistics behind these issues. I found her excerpt to be very effective in getting her point across. To build her ethos, Schwartz-Nobel uses a multitude of facts and statistics in the beginning of the article. She loads the beginning of her paper with facts because a majority her paper is narrative, but throughout the narrative she also includes prickles to help the people in the audience who look for hard facts to support claims. However, the most effective part of her excerpt is the use of pathos and narrative to connect the readers to people suffering from these situations. Schwartz-Nobel tells her story of visiting many homeless shelters in San Diego and describes her journey in a way that allows the audience to emotionally step into her shoes. Also during her visits, she uses three stories from three totally different people to show the issue of poverty of from all different perspectives. The story of her time with John, the Volunteer Director at the St. Vincent de Paul Village, tells his perspective of the homeless shelter. John provides a hopeful outlook on the issue, which causes the audience to believe that they can help. The story of Tina, a young new mom who recently entered this situation, illustrates to the readers that almost anyone can be thrown into this situation and it is not as easy as it appears to be to climb out of that hole. Her final testimony is from a single mother named Melissa, who is experienced living this life and struggles to feed her teenage son. Melissa was put into this story to demonstrate the illogical sense of the welfare/institutional system. More importantly, Melissa tells the hard truths of living the impoverished life. She talks about having to steal food in order to provide enough food for her and her son to survive. I like how she ends the excerpt with this testimony because the sometimes hard to digest information is what the audience reacts to most. In all, I found Schwartz-Nobel’s excerpt to be very effective is putting her point across due to her strong use of pathos and universal themes.