Every Saturday on my way home from my cross-country meet at Franklin Park, I drive along a street where I see fifteen-year-old girls carrying their own children, middle-aged men clutching brown bags with bottles of liquor inside, eleven-year-old boys hanging around the corner with gangs.

I lock my door as many people do, and pretend not to see the scene before me. This is how most suburbanites react when they drive through a "bad" part of town.

We avoid the issue that half of America's population is living in poverty and seem to turn to drugs and crime to escape that poverty. We are more concerned that the poverty not affect our taxes and that the "bad" neighborhoods do not encroach on our own.

The government continues to support the poor in other countries and to build up a defense system at the expense of young mothers, poor older men, and eleven-year-olds wandering our cities' streets. It is time that the government serves the people it was created for and it is time that we Americans stop ignoring the problems in our cities and work toward forcing policy changes which would help. n