Dark Days

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Jared Piedra
Sociology 181
Dr. Karen Pandolpho
20th December 2010
Dark Days

The people who live by the tracks in New York City are a branch of society which is the homeless or people in absolute poverty. They also have their own personal society which does not go by the rules of regular society, but they still manage to keep a sense of order within the people that live there, which is one of the main components of a society. The components of society that I recognize in the video are the absolute impoverished and the homeless, these people are composed of usually outcasts who because of maybe drug addiction or crime and become chastised for their past. The social structure that I observed in the video is, as I stated earlier, people who were outcast-ed from society as a whole due to the fact that they were possibly born in to poverty stricken homes without much opportunity. Most of these people had lived tragic lives with many traumatic experiences, which possibly lead them to more resentfulness towards society from these individuals. But what I noticed was the companionship that these people represented, because they understood each others struggles, they provided each other with a sense of social structure and replicated the family essence. The various social interactions I observed in the video were all based on a sense of understanding and empathy towards the other individual in the same situation. When thinking of homeless people living underground by the train tracks you would think that it would be total anarchy and lawless and where as a couple violent occurrences happen

(like Dee's house getting burned) but there is a sense of order and respect towards the other individuals.
A functionalist would think when seeing this video that these people are just a part of another sub group of society, and that a person can survive with just the basic essentials for life. But they would also state that homelessness...
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