La mujer del juez

Poverty, the way Jonathan Kozol describes it in Amazing Grace, seems to be a plague for which there is no cure. However, as Kozol analyzes different parts of poor New York neighborhoods, one comes to find that vaccines and cures for this disease exist but that it is the lack of opportunity to receive the cure fostered by those living outside these areas that stifles all hope of overcoming thissickness of poverty. While money may not be the key to happiness, it does help to ensure it. Kozol depicts a society that has been cut off from this ensured happiness and has been left to battle housing conflicts, below average schools, drug use, prison systems, as well as issues of health with little acknowledgment and understanding from those sitting higher up on the social ladder. Each one ofthese issues directly affects individuals’ lives on a daily basis especially in terms of racial discrimination. The factor that seems to provide support is spirituality, for some a more direct belief in an organized religion, and the religious institutions that maintain such moral support.
Unfortunately, these problematic issues have not been addressed fully by the institutions—sectors of thegovernment—which in turn has led them to evolve and grow instead of diminish. Each issue may stand alone in the eyes of the government, but in the daily lives of poor individuals, these complex problems overlap and become tangled into one large web of restraint. To visualize the effects of multiple issues on one individual, Kozol refers to the life of Mrs. Washington and her family. Mrs.Washington is a well educated woman who by the forces of societal norms, fell victim to not only a faulty marriage but also the ferocious disease of AIDS (Kozol, 1995; 21). After having to quit her second job due to additional health concerns, she was forced to go onto federal welfare (Kozol, 1995; 21). Her son, David, talks about his mother’s reliance on the federal aid and even begins to questionwhether she is trying to make herself more ill simply to qualify for SSI (Kozol, 1995; 22). Multiple times throughout the book Kozol recounts the hospital scene nightmares and injustices where Mrs. Washington, among others, is forced to wait in the waiting room of the hospital for days before full admittance, being turned away from a private hospital only a few blocks away for her race and socialclass, and being placed in hospital wards unsuited for her illness (Kozol, 1995; 16, 98,179, 207). On top of her personal struggles, her son struggles to make the most of his high school education and the opportunities allotted to him with such limit resources, and her daughter is struggling to maintain her own family in substandard housing (Kozol, 1995; 51, 53, 153-156). While Mrs. Washington’slife seems unplausable to those who live outside this area, Kozol assures readers that Mrs. Washington is only one of thousands fighting the same battle: poverty.
As shown in Mrs. Washington’s life, however, it is apparent that poverty does not simply exist through failure to apply good Protestant work ethic to one’s life, but rather poverty sneaks up on those who are getting by comfortably inone moment, then fall victim to an illness or family emergency and are never quite able to make it back on their feet. In Mrs. Washington’s situation, the way in which she contracted the HIV virus was through a husband to whom she was forced to choose. The word “forced” is used because Kozol explains her marital situation as one in which black women of her social class of the 1950s only hadcertain black men of a low social class (Kozol, 1995; 21). The treatment of her AIDS was defaulted to minimal care because of an inability to work two jobs— after having received higher education—and support her family and failing health. If she had lived in an upper class community, would she have faced as many problems as a single mother? Would her health have been treated so inadequately? It is...