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“Disposable Citizens”

J. Mastracchio

(12/4/07)

There is a second class of citizens within the United States. If you think the

classes are determined by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, or income levels youare wrong. There is a class of citizens who permeate through every social ranking; they

are the disposable citizens. They are the people we simply write off, the people who we

do not care about and only want to go away. They are the fathers, mothers, brothers, andsisters; they are our friends who are forgotten and unknown.

Poverty creates many of these citizens. It is not because of their low income they

are second class, it is because society has abandoned them. The homeless are seen as a

plague across many major cities. They are citizens who are ignored; they are dirty,smelly, and are often mentally disabled. Society has all but thrown them away; they are

on the fringe of society. It’s easy to tell them to just get a job, but that solution creates

another question, who will hire a dirty, smelly, junkie?

Junkie, I know I would never want to be called a junkie. I guess a junkie meansthat a person is addicted to a substance. They have a mental or physical craving that can

only be quenched by a “fix.” In many people’s minds the solution is stop using andsociety will accept you again. Just stop, just say no; if it were only that easy. How many

Americans have an addiction? Everyone, whether it’s the caffeine in your morning

coffee, the nicotine in your cigarette, the porn you watch every day of the week, or the

McDonalds fries you cant get enough of. Too much of anything is an addiction. Why dowe throw those with addictions into the fringe, why do we abandon them when they need

help?

Although 35 million smokers make an attempt to quit every year, fewer than 7%achieve even one year of abstinence. Telling them to simply stop is not going to work.

Why do we want them to stop? Not because they are addicted, but because smoking isbad for the health of the smoker and those around the smoking. Society’s response to thishealth threat is to punish the addicts, raise the price of cigarettes and stop people from

smoking them in public. It is not the smokers fault cigarettes have so many harmful

chemicals; why should the addicted carry the burden.We punish the smoker not the companies who make smoking bad for you.

Smokers don’t add Benzene, Formaldehyde, Ammonia, Acetone, Arsenic, or Hydrogen

Cyanide to the products they use, the cigarette companies do. Perhaps a better solution

would be more regulation, take out the harmful chemicals, this way the addicts can use arelatively safe product, with minimal harm to those around them. Maybe if society

advocated safer products instead of throwing away addicts, any addict, some real changes

would occur. But who cares an addict is one step away from a criminal.Ex-convicts are some of the most neglected citizens in the United States, in some

states they do not have the right to vote, and it is very hard for them to find jobs. Jail

time is the mark of an outcast; ex-cons are the dirty little secret we like to forget. Mostcriminals do not have a high education; most of them resort to crime for survival. If a

criminal gets caught they are sent to prison, they not only lose years of their life, but also

are put a step lower than everyone else in society. Once released from prison an ex-con

is far less likely to get a good job then before they went in; maybe that’s why over two-

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thirds of ex-cons return to crime and prison. Society abandons them and expects them to

pick up the slack. Who cares though, once a criminal always a criminal; it doesn’t matter 

that in some states murderers are more likely to get parole than a sex offender.There are thousands of convicted sex offenders are reporting to police that they

are homeless. (Not surprising since 54% of homeless people were incarcerated at some

point in their lives.) Landlords won't rent to them and the laws in dozens of states andhundreds of cities bar them from living near areas where kids play. Jill Levenson, a sex-

crimes policy analyst at Lynn University, says that homeless sex offenders are more

likely to commit another crime.The residency restrictions placed on sex offenders is the leading cause of their 

homelessness. Some states keep sex offenders locked up until they find housing, in other 

states sex offenders can be arrested just for being homeless. Even if a sex offender is no

longer committing sex offences, in some states they are arrested for not being able to finda place to live, due to the restrictions placed upon them; where is the logic?

The policies in place today lack sound logic. What right to we have to throw

citizens away, to write them off and then complain when they cause problems. The

stigma associated with those in the disposable class is what cripples a society. Society,the totality of human relationships, should be the focus of daily life; the betterment not

only of ourselves as individuals, but of everyone as a whole. Those on the fringe of society are no less human than you or I. People are people; listen to the words of 

Marcusson, “People Are Alike All Over.” They are the sum of the infiniteness of their 

lives, just as you are the sum of yours. To ask people to fit into your mold is like me

asking you to become me, impossible. People have their reasons for the way they are,even if we don’t understand them. If it was your mother, your father, your brother, your 

sister, your friend, could you write them off so easily?