On Dumpster Diving

The author of "On Dumpster Diving" really gives me a different perspective of what I thought most of them would be like. When the author says, "I am sorry for them" at the end of the paper it really made me think for a second. The author says, "Between us are the rat-race millions who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what." That sentence really made me think because I am a person that searches the television at night not knowing what I am looking for. The author always knew what he was doing and what he was looking for. At the beginning of the essay when the writer says, "I began Dumpster diving a year before I became homeless", it really surprises me because I would have definitely thought that he would have started dumpster diving after. It really changed my feelings about how I will now look at people that I see in dumpsters, I cannot automatically assume that they are all homeless because I do not know their stories. It shocked me when he said, "I prefer the word scavenging." I would have never thought that someone that was searching through dumpsters would have any care in the world in what they were calling it. It made me realize that just because you have to go to those levels of searching for things in that way does not mean you are dumb in any manner. I was also stunned me when he said that," Except for jeans, all my clothes came from Dumpsters." What stunned me in this sentence is that he did not get his jeans from the dumpsters. You would think that someone that is homeless and does not have much money at all would get whatever clothes they can out of the dumpsters. I thought it was a little weird that out of all things he gets out of dumpsters he does not get his jeans from them. One of the things that really made me think throughout this story was when the author said that," Some students, and others, approach defrosting a freezer by chucking out the whole lot." The reason that this made me think a lot was because when I was at home I would all the time throw perfectly good stuff out of the freezer and the refrigerator. After reading this I really need to consider more about what I throw away and what I don't. If it is still good and I do not want it there are certainly a lot of people in the world that would be very thankful for having it. This story really made me reconsider what I said was my first assumptions. The author told the story in a way that gave you a different perspective of why some people dumpster dive; they just don't do it for alcohol but some people really need to in order to survive.

...