Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed has brought many aspects of what the New York Times calls, "the working poor" to the center. She sheds light on a class many of us never really stop to think about and gives us an all access backstage pass to their everyday life. I mean, how many people actually wonder where their waitress lives, or how much the cook at McDonalds can afford to eat? Honestly, before this book I never gave it much thought. When I told my grandmother what Ehrenreich was doing, she couldn't understand why she was doing such a thing. "It's clear that a man who fries french fries for a living can't support himself, let alone a family," she said. To really understand what these people are going through, you have to pay attention. Unfortunately, most of us don't. Most of us never even give it a thought. You simply find comfort in the thought that they get by somehow don't they? Yes indeed they do, but I wonder if people think of what that somehow is. It's having 2 or 3 jobs, or living in your car, or eating a bag of chips for lunch. Barbara brings all this to our attention, and is changing the way this nation looks at its working poor. She writes, "These experiences are not part of a substantial lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans-as a state of emergency." I couldn't believe what Ehrenreich had to go through just to be able to sleep under a roof. We've got to understand that these people are desperately needed. They are the backbone of America today, and without them we wouldn't know what to do. Just imagine how many places would burn down if CEO's had to flip their own hamburgers. We see them, but we don't see them. We see t...