"...Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickel and Dimed
The mass media, undeniably, has its flaws. Yet when we turn on our television sets at night, it's much easier to reflect on the things that we do see- the stereotypical portrayals of gender roles, for example, or the often-biased news coverage about global warming- than about the things, and people, that we don't see at all.
It can be all too easy to avert our eyes, to avoid recognition of the poor in our midst as we walk down city streets or past shelters and food banks. When even the media turns a blind eye, who is left to remind us of the rich stories and histories that characterize the lives of these "invisible" people?
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