Summary

In the second part of “The Place I Was From,” the author describes becoming increasingly aware of the relationship between politics and poverty. She describes voting Republican in an election in the early 2000’s, and how her voting habits were initially defined by those of her mother, who always voted Republican because she was convinced that Republican policies were the only ones that would enable the poor to improve their position on their own terms. The author then describes how her perspectives changed once she started doing more research and saw hard numbers that proved the poor would almost always stay poor, and how the banking and political systems perpetuated the set of circumstances that allowed that to happen. She then comments that it was around that time that she stopped believing in the American Dream, coming to realize just how empty its...