Blog #4 On Dumpster Diving by Lars Eighner
When it comes to homelessness I never really put much thought into it. I know that it’s sad and very unfortunate to have to live on the streets but as harsh as it may seem I kind of ignored it. Lars Eighner gave us a personal insight on a life for a homeless person. His story was very touching and emotion when he goes on to described how he lived. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live life on the streets. It’s amazing to hear that he recovered from being on the streets and now has his life together again. Eighner was once living on the streets to now having his own book “Travels with Lizbeth”.
The tone is this essay seems to be informing but not in a very serious way, at least it didn’t seem like that to me. Eighner talks about the best way to go dumpster diving as if he is describing how to do a job. When he talks about his experience being homeless it doesn’t seem like he his ashamed about it, yet a good lessoned learned. He now looks at life differently, but in a better way. The way the essay is written is in a friendly way like giving advice to someone. It is also sort of like a safety lesson on how to go dumpster diving. In his essay he used a pathos appeal to further his opinion about dumpster diving. You can’t but help feel some emotion while reading this as he talks about his experiences. One part in particular that had touched me was when he was talking about his dog “So I suppose when her time comes she too will go into a Dumpster. I will have no better place for her.” It made me feel bad for Eighner that he has no better place to burry one of this loved ones. He did an excellent job with the pathos appeal as well as the logos. While talking about his rules when he comes to dumpster diving he used logic and common sense, “Need I say that home-canned goods are simply too risky to be recommended”.
The audience is your average person, I’m not sure that he is necessarily focusing in on a particular target audience. People should really think more about what they are throwing out, Eighner talks about how people just throw away perfectly good food. A quote I have heard before seems appropriate to mention “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure” in this case it is totally true. Just hearing about all the sorts of things that he found is very interesting to know what people throw out, and think that no-one else will ever see it. In a way I suppose it’s good for the homeless people that we waste so much stuff, otherwise we wouldn’t be reading on the ways of dumpster diving.
The main point of this essay is to get people to really think about what they are really throwing out. Also I feel like he is trying to describe how materialistic we are and how we take things for granted. He talks about how we throw away perfectly good food, and that we are very wasteful. The way he gets his point across his by talking about his past experiences as a homeless person, which I believe to be the most effect way. What better way to get people aware of homelessness than to write about actual experiences that have taken place. You can’t fully understand something until you have lived it, and Eighner is sharing us his story. At the end of his essay he has learned two valuable lessons, “Take what you can use and let the rest go” as well as “Transience of material being”. It is easy to see that Eighner has taken away a new outlook on life. It makes you realize that you shouldn’t worry about what you don’t have but should in fact be happy for what you do have. Whereas there are other people in the world who have to go dumpster diving in order to survive.
Question for the class: Do you feel bad for the homeless people and they way they have to live? Or do you believe it’s their own fault because at some point in time they made bad decisions which led them to live on the streets. What would you do to stop homelessness?