It’s all just a numbers game
March 15, 2010The first thing that I noticed about this article written by Paige Williams was the quote included inside the image that reads “ Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.” Personally, this simple quote taken from Dr Martin Luther King’s presidential address brought out a sense of inspiration from within me at the thought that somewhere in the future, society will be equal, despite the naivety of what it sounds like at the moment.
The most shocking value that I found in this article was $10.50- the amount that was considered a ‘living wage’ and one that would help low income workers climb out of the poverty they live in. What I thought made this amount even more sadder was the fact that employers were still trying to find loopholes past this, some paying there workers only $8.50 per hour, clearly only allowing for the bare minimum to survive.
Finally, the last story of the article was definitely the most moving out of the feature where we met Vicky and Will and their devotion to stay alive, as well as to each other. This specific part of the article is an example of where White uses highly emotive language to get the reader to feel empathy for the characters she is writing about and the people she has introduced us to, leaving us with the feeling at the end of reading that something does need to be done to ensure that this type of lifestyle no longer exists for anyone.
This article I felt was more effective in terms of hitting the reader with a more emotional bullet compared to Nick McKenzie’s “The minister, money and Ms Liu”. Due to the fact that it was so full of statistics, it did make the article feel more informative with a sentimental edge compared to McKenzie’s straightforward fact machine style writing. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m the type of girl who loves the trashy magazine gossip (actually I AM that girl!) but Williams’s article definitely has the upper edge because of the way she presents it, and for me at least the all round winner, if this was a competition of course.
