I posted the following comment to a segment on 'All Things Considered' about a single mother trying to eke out a living in Reading, Pennsylvania, which is now evidently the poorest city of its size in America. The segment aired on Wednesday, July 11,2012, if you're interested. It makes for fairly dispiriting listening.
"If this woman is typical of the residents of Reading, it's not hard to see why it's devolving into a third-world city. Uneducated, if not ineducable; colossally irresponsible in bringing three children into the world (by different fathers, yet) with no apparent thought as to how to provide for them. Her life seems a hodgepodge of government handouts of one sort or another. Even the job she claims she's aiming at seems just another phony makework government job.
It's hard to know whether this kind of monumental cluelessness is somehow learned or just innate. The result is the same in any case. Third-world people make third-world cities-- and countries. First-world people-- civilized, educated, responsible-- make first-world countries. It's pretty much that simple."
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