If You Came This Way: A Journey Through the Lives of the Underclass

Peter Davis

may 2015 · Open Road Media

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At each stage of their lives—from infant cribs to teen dropouts to welfare dependents to basement shelters for the elderly—the people of the underclass are shunned by the rest of the population, even by the working poor. The cycle is vicious: Underclass children get little help in their own homes (when they have homes); they are shoved aside at school until they drop out like their parents did; they are unable to find decent work without an education; they have children of their own for whom they cannot provide adequate care; and finally, they are dumped into human (but inhumane) warehouses for the not-quite-deceased. America cannot afford to do this to its poorest citizens; we cannot afford not to rescue the underclass. In the richest country on earth, the people of the underclass are not merely a problem, they are a scandal.

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Peter Davis is an acclaimed author and filmmaker whose writing has won praise from Graham Greene, John Irving, Robert Stone, and William Styron. He covered the war in Iraq for the Nation and was a contributing editor for Esquire. He spent eighteen months traveling among the poorest Americans for If You Came This Way, the title of which is from a poem by T. S. Eliot. Davis’s films have won many prizes, and he received an Academy Award for his documentary on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds.