Empathy and Economic Hardship

I commented below about how having your life upended for a while can dramatically reduce your interest in social causes that your were previously passionate about, such as environmental responsibility. By contrast, I found a surprisingly strong empathy quickly developed in myself with other people going through financial distress. In reality my financial situation is relatively good in terms of short term funds and overall job prospects. However, there were some rather dark periods where I wasn't sure that this was the case. Now I feel a type of personal bond with those people for whom the outlook is much more bleak.

Andrew Sullivan does a great job in his blog of posting occasional personal stories of people dealing with economic hardships. Consider the story of a young couple who married in 2007 and bought a house at the height of the housing bubble. They're working very hard struggling to pay off a huge mortgage on a house that is now probably worth $150,000 less than they owe on that mortgage. If either of them looses their job, which is very possible, they loose everything. By conventional standards, they are a hard working couple that did nothing wrong.

I recently heard about a local case in my community of a woman who showed up at a food pantry for the first time. She described her husband as a very hard working man who always did a good job of providing for her and their three children. He's a construction worker though, and hasn't had work in months. Their savings are gone, they have nothing left, and they're about to loose their house. Unlike me, they did not get a big severance package complete with health care benefits when his work ended, they have no pension to look forward too, and as a young couple I doubt they have much if any 401K funds that they can tap into.

There are so many good people in terrible distress right now, generally through no real fault of their own. Those of us who are relatively secure have a hard time imagining what this actually feels like. My heart goes out to them in a way it never used to. Whenever anyone asks me a survey question about national priorities, job creation now jumps to the top of my list closely followed by making health care available to everyone.