Politicians Who Oppose Healthcare Reform

¶ … politicians who oppose healthcare reform have never known what it was like to not have healthcare or have forgotten. The same can be applied to education. People who have an education, who have always been academically gifted may have forgotten or do not now what it is like to have started being illiterate or not knowing how to perform simple addition and subtraction. Mike Rose, the author of Lives on the Boundary is able to convey from a viewpoint, he himself remembered, the struggle of educating and being educated. It is very interesting dynamic that needs to be further explored.

Lives on the Boundary is a work of non-fiction that portrays the constant struggle of working class youth attempting to gain an education in school, specifically literacy. Chapter one introduces us to Mike Rose telling a story about the happenings of his summer vacation. The time frame was between fifth and sixth grade. Some of the things he did was sell strawberries door to door and worked with neighborhood kids for a Chicano named Frank. He would drive them to the "good neighborhoods" and in between the time he sold the strawberries, he would tell the other kids stories on page 22. "There I was, a skinny bookwork drawing the attention of street kids who, in any other circumstances, would have had me for breakfast. Like an epic tale-teller, I developed the stories as I went along, relying on a flexible plot line and a repository of heroic events." (Rose, 22)

In chapter two, Rose discusses the forced self numbing of the children who are classified as slow, remedial, or deficient by assuming a type of mentality that degrades their very own intelligence. They protect themselves by assuming the implied identities of such labels -- the "I don't care. Screw this bullshit. I just want to be a Common Joe." On page 29 of the book he mentions this state of mind. "Common Joe, champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course is everything -- you and others- fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scientific reasoning…" (Rose, 29)

In chapter 3 Mike Roses show the difficulties that he encounters during his transition into college and how he confronted those difficulties, especially, after his friend had committed suicide. The death of his friend changed the course of his life. Through his writing he shows that guidance and advice is needed when tackling a problem too difficult to bear on one's own. He believes that we can't make a successful career without learning from without the experience of others: "You'll need people to guide you into conversations that seem foreign and threatening" (Rose, 48) He also states: "you'll need people to help you centre your self in your own developing ideas" (Rose, 48) a good example of this would be his role model, the teacher he mentions quite often.