Sociology Week 15

This week in sociology we continued our discussion of social class. We watched the movie, "People Like Us" and "30 Days". This one part of People Like Us really stuck with me. It showed this family in the US who was living well below the poverty line. This single mother had a few children and they all lived in a trailer. She had to walk 10 miles to work everyday, which was at McDonalds. It was so sad to see. I cannot ever imagine walking ten miles to a job, let alone that job being McDonalds. It was also really sad because her son was clearly very embarrassed of her and extremely disrespectful. In the movie "30 Days" it was a wealthy couple attempting to live off of minimum wage for a month. It was really difficult for them. They had to get a really small apartment that had no furniture and ants crawling all around. They couldn't enjoy holidays and birthdays because they didn't have the money to. They also both ended up having health problems that landed them in the emergency room totaling to over 1000 dollars. It's impossible for someone on minimum wage to pay that. That made me think of the time my little sister went to the emergency room, got tylenol and that's it, and was charged 500 dollars. I can't imagine who we could pay that off if my parents were working minimum wage jobs. It's really an eye opener to see how so many people in this country have to live. And as we've been learning, it's really tough to move up in social class. People say you just have to work hard, but the truth is that a lot of these people working minimum wage are working very hard.