We were the only ones on the bus going from the Hertz rental drop off back to the airport.  Little Man, the husband and I were returning from a week plus at my mom’s place in Florida where I had spent most of my holiday dividing my efforts between chasing the Little Man on the beach, soaking up the sun in a beach chair, and restraining myself from saying something I might regret to my mother.

We had somehow managed to avoid the look of a harried traveling family by sheer divine grace.  We had already at that point packed our bags near to bursting, arranged for the balance of the Christmas presents to be shipped home, and driven over two hours and decamped all our belongings from the trusty rental vehicle, including three suitcases, two carry ons, and a five point harness car seat that was packed in its own bag along with my son’s sleeping menagerie – a coterie of stuffed animals without which it is impossible for him to achieve REM sleep.*  I guess the point was, we looked harmless enough.

The driver began with a typical question asked of travelers the world over – “Where are you from?”  But the conversation soon turned more serious than simple superficial pleasantries.  He wanted to know if people were losing jobs where we lived the way they were here.  Turns out our Hertz rental car bus transport driver had been a proud business owner, until his business folded two years ago, leaving him without a job and $40,000 in debt.  Now even his job as a bus transport driver is apparently going away, because the Hertz facility will be moving onsite at the airport and there will no longer be a need for bus transports or people to drive them.  Our driver was 62 years old.  He has no savings, nothing really to show for all the work he has done over the course of his life.  He has one daughter he can turn to, but being a proud man, he is reluctant to ask for help. 

It was a short drive, maybe five to ten minutes, tops.  But over the course of the drive, our bus driver confided his fears and frustrations on a number of issues that six months ago he probably never would have dreamed of sharing with strangers.  He was worried about how many jobs were being lost, and questioning whether the government could really be a safe employer in this day and age.  He was frustrated that after proudly emigrating to this country 20 years ago, he could not support the economy by buying a shirt that was made in this country, because most of the shirts he could afford were made in places like China and Guatamala and Bangladesh.  He had no idea how he was going to make a way through his predicament.

It was actually surprising how much of his life this man managed to share with us in under ten minutes. What was hard to stomach was that his story, by contrast, was utterly unsurprising.  There are thousands, millions of people who are precisely in the same fix – no savings, no job, and facing the prospect of one’s “golden years” with no idea how to support oneself in an economy that is hemorrhaging jobs. Make no mistake – the worst is not yet come. 

Even before the banking crisis this September, the poverty statistics in this country were sobering: most Americans live within spitting distance of the poverty threshold – the poverty threshold for a family of four is $21,134, and the average median household income in the United States is $48,201.  With the savings rate in the United States stalled for the past four years at under 1% (finally ticking up to 3% this summer), it’s not like most families have money in the bank to shore themselves up should a breadwinner lose his or her job. As the ranks of the unemployed swell, so too will the poverty rolls. Not that having a job is necessarily the key to avoiding being a statistic.  Almost half of adults below the poverty line actually do hold jobs, and a third of those are holding full-time, year-round jobs. 

Jon Henner’s excellent post about the cluelessness of those who try to romanticize poverty is a point well-taken.  The hard mathematical truth is that for many of us, the line between being a “have” and a “have not” is becoming as much a matter of luck as anything else.  The commonly held but misguided belief that somehow if you are poor it is invariably because you are not willing to work hard enough or not interested in bettering your economic position has never been more wrong.  Millions of Americans who worked hard and educated themselves and did everything the way they were supposed to are suddenly finding themselves jobless, strapped with mortgages they can no longer afford, aging in the face of spiraling medical costs, or finding that their dreams for things like college education for their kids or a comfortable retirement have slipped away. Just as it is ill-advised to romanticize poverty, likewise it is inappropriate to demonize it.

You see, over the years we forgot a good many of the lessons we should have learned the last time we had a severe economic downturn in this country, but chief among them is why there was such a need for the “social safety net” of the New Deal – because being poor is not always someone’s “fault.” And no matter what the reason, letting your fellow man suffer when you can do something about it is no way to treat him when there but for the grace of God go you.

And on a day-to-day basis, it is going to become much more commonplace that we will meet people like my Hertz bus transport driver, folks who are close to the edge financially, who are looking for answers and frightened.  Some will reach out.  Some will lash out.  The thing I recognize is that it would have been just as easy for the man we met to be so bitter about his predicament that the sight of a happy family returning from a Florida vacation would render him sullen and angry.  It’s the kind of thing that could really stick in your craw.  

Looking at it in that light, his willingness to talk so openly, so honestly, about what he was going through was truly extraordinary.  For so many others, the urge is to pretend that everything is okay, even as the world is crumbling around them. 

Nobility is not the province of the wealthy or the poor.  The measure of a man’s character has nothing to do with the size of his bank account.  But sure as shootin’ when the hard times come, you can tell what kind of man he is.  As our Hertz bus transport driver handed my husband one of the suitcases off the bus, my husband pulled a five dollar bill from his wallet and looked over at me.  I nodded.  It wasn’t enough to make a difference.  But it was what we could spare.  This recession will test all of us to see what we are made of – do we get bitter when things get rough? Or do we reach out to our fellow man and admit we are vulnerable?  Do we extend our help to someone in trouble, or do we blame them for their predicament?  We like to think we know the answers to these questions.

Truth is, until we actually get there, we don’t know shit.

 * Current members of the menagerie include:  Ellie the Elephant, Eeyore, Cow, Puppy, Ming-Ming, Horsey, Dolphin, Purple Dolphin, Little Horsey, Elmo, Mousie.  These are the regulars.  There are itinerant members who rotate into the lineup.  Basically, you can tell how much my son loves a stuffed animal by how fast it gets tossed into bed with him.  We drew the line at the kitten that meowed when you squeezed it, named, naturally, Kitty (My son may not be inventive with his names, but he IS consistent).  He accidentally rolled on top of it during the night, sending Kitty into a yowling fit that not only woke him, but us via the baby monitor.