Dear Society,
I walked in my English class one day and was assigned some old book called “Crime and Punishment” and was told to read it. The book its self is extremely hard to understand. Due to the type of context they use and older language, it makes everything harder to understand. But basically The story is about a poor man named Rask has nothing to lose. This man has several issues that people would call crazy or insane. He’s not a religious man so he feels that crime or even murder can be justified as long as you have something to “offer to humanity” he goes through several struggles during this book and meets two major friends, Sonia and Razum. Which is just a nick name I gave him cause his actual name is too long.
In this book Rask’s close friends Sonia is just as broke as he is and has no way to support herself or her family. So she has to resort to prostitution just to make ends meet. Rask goes through his life stealing and killing to get money. Razum manipulates the people he loves for money and just spends it on alcohol. All these struggles in this book are due to poverty, people are forced to do bad things just to get money.
I chose to speak about this topic because I’ve first hand went through poverty and struggling and I still witness it in the people around me today. This is my issue because people in our society are blind to it or see it but just don’t think it’s actually that bad when it really is. Money has been an issue throughout my whole life, bouncing back and forth from house to house. Not being able to pay bill, taking cold showers, opening the oven just so we could have heat in the house. My struggles were a lot simpler then the characters in my book’s struggles. I was worried about not having to were the same school clothes 2 years in a row, they were worried about their next meal. That is what makes this issue so important to me, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to not know when my next meal was going to be. That is not a good life to live and the sad thing is so many people are fortunate enough to live a good life in a big house and still complain, still want more. Not knowing there are people out there who have nothing.
My letter is directed to society as a whole. We need to be more aware of poverty and the suffering of our own people. Poverty is not an occasion or something that happens here and there. It happens every day 24/7 for a lot of people. Those people you see sleeping under highways or in shelters are struggling with poverty, those people don’t chose to live their life that way.
The purpose of my letter is to spread awareness about poverty and the suffering of our people. This is something that should be taken serious. Our people should not have to live like this. Everyone who is suffering is going through a lot of mental stress. But if they had one person to just step up and be able to motivate them and help them out. Tell them that they matter and their life matters. Someone who cares for them, then that is all it takes to help them. Just like in the book when Rask went to jail, Sonia was there for him to let him know she loved him and that was all he needed to accept what he did was wrong and to turn his life around. It doesn’t take much to be that person, so why not do It?
