Contrary to what the the upper class tells you, the homeless and poor are not extinct. Rather, we are extant. I understand how their self centered bourgeois minds could confuse the two. They sound so similar, and who has the time to discern the difference when there are porches to buy? We are destitute, barely getting by. All the while, the conservatives force corrosive lies about how we all game the system, and buy mercedes, mansions, and crack. Those lies, those lies do no justice to the squalid conditions me and my family live in.

We are poor. There isn’t a way to sugar coat it. My mom is single, and works full time to support her kids. You just gotta love deadbeat dads! My mom tried to act happy and up tempo, but her facade wore thin over the years, and now me and my younger sister see her somber, morose spirit everyday after she gets home from work. My mom is one of the people who gave your ungrateful brats their happy meal. She’s also probably the one who got yelled at when they didn’t get the toy they wanted.

I’m a fifteen year old boy. I went from idealistically seeing the world as fun, happy, even peaceful. In just fifteen years, I have grown jaded. I now know just how turbulent and vociferous my life is. I know that, if my mom screws up an order, or pisses her boss off, we could be sleeping on the streets. One of my favorite memories of when I was little was right after christmas. We had just moved to a smaller apartment. I asked santa for a house with commodious rooms, and a voluminous swimming pool! Nowadays, I share a room with my eight year old sister. Soon after that Christmas, I began to reluctantly waive my fantasies of the “good life.”

Every night I thank God for what we have. I’m jaded and cynical, self centered, save my family, and I know it. But the one thing is, I know it could be ten thousand times worse. We could be homeless. I know I would survive and so would my mom, but my sister? There's no way i’m letting an eight year old girl be raised in the chaos of the street. I don’t want her happy dreams to be buffeted by the sound of car horns and drunks stumbling home at dawn. Sadly, she wouldn’t be the youngest person on the street. Statistics show that half the people under the age of eighteen on the street, are under five. And half the homeless are eighteen or younger. I don’t want passers on the street to abhor us because we live on the street.

My mom’s biggest fear is that we become evicted from our apartment. In fact, she obviates every night should that ever happen. She spends her little free time coloring with my sister. My sister draws ponies and fairies. My mom draws up plans for vociferous signs, should we ever have to beg on the road.

I find the rich, the government, all the upper class reprehensible for allowing poverty to happen, for children to live on the streets, and to worry about when, where, and how much they will eat. We live in a country where we have plenty. We throw away enough food everyday to feed several third world countries every day. Yet we seem to intern all of this plenty, and give it out to the one percent. They are maritent in their capitalistic rules. “If you work this long, this hard, do this much, you will be successful like me!” our beloved, benevolent rich berate and reiterate to us everyday. They have no tolerance for the renegades who slip through their plans, and end up on the streets, or homeless.

What is the solution? I don’t have one, not a perfect one. But why do we need a perfect solution? We don’t live in a perfect world. You can clearly discern that when you pass the homeless in cardboard boxes. Whatever the solution is, we must amend our current system, and fix it, so that a fourth of the population of the homeless are toddlers.