When hardship turns to shame

Back in the 1980s I went on a reporting trip to Nicaragua. My visit took me, among other places, to a poor neighborhood of Managua, where I met a family from Ohio.

They had come to the country as missionaries but the young mother was eager to tell me what her new neighbors had given her.

She pointed to her young son, who was happily careening through the dusty street with a bunch of kids and dogs, wheeling a homemade toy made from a jar lid nailed to the end of a stick.

“He has more fun with that than any of the fancy toys he had at home,” she enthused.

At home, more often than not, he played alone. Here everyone was poor but they somehow had more fun. It would be hard, the young mother told me, to return to Cleveland.

Especially now. A lot of people in Ohio — and New York and Arizona and Georgia — are having a rough time.

They are having to do without, and yet they still feel they have to keep up middle-class appearances.

All of a sudden, in private, almost furtive conversations, I’m hearing a lot of stories.

A friend who has stopped driving because she can’t afford car repairs.

A family that had to shower at friends’ houses for two months because they couldn’t pay their gas bill.

A couple who go to bed early to stay warm since their furnace broke and they haven’t the money for a new one. They have a fireplace but firewood in the suburbs is expensive.

Furnaces, in fact, loom large in these stories. In a tight few months, when I had an oil furnace, I couldn’t come up with the $300-plus required for the 100-gallon minimum the suppliers would deliver.

I found my furnace would run on diesel, so every few days I’d fill a 5-gallon container at the gas station.

All around you, I guarantee, there are people who look just fine — on the surface.

They have enough good clothes in their closets left over from better times to keep up appearances, and when they show up at work (if they still have a job) or at church or the PTA meeting, you’d never guess they were hurting.

One young mother I know has rebranded the cheap garbanzo beans she serves for her kids’ benefit as Golden Beans.

The big, dramatic face of the recession appears as layoffs and home foreclosures.

But as more and more people I know confess to the small deprivations I’m describing, I’m convinced that there’s this submerged-iceberg mass of misery underneath a huge number of lives, made more miserable by the need to keep it hidden.

This isn’t exactly Little House on the Prairie stuff, now happening in the American suburbs. But it’s close: being cold. Being hungry. Thin Christmases, constant worry.

What’s missing is the sense of community and shared hardship — because in 21st-century America, hardship is an occasion for shame.

I think back to the stories my own mother told about coming of age in the Depression. Her family did without a radio so she could go to college.

She made it through, got herself a teaching job and bought her first car. Now people with college degrees can’t keep their cars running.

Back then, everyone was in it together. The poverty was worse, the crisis was deeper — but it was shared. It pervaded popular culture.

I may be missing something, but I don’t hear any songs on the radio about the holes in my friends’ lives. Poverty has become privatized. No one wants to talk about it, even if the cause is no more under their control than it was two generations ago.

That Central American trip 25 years ago also took me to Honduras, where a fellow journalist confessed to me that North America scared him, not because of its might but because its citizens had to keep up such a frenzied pace to survive.

“We’re poor here,” he told me, “but we take more time with each other. We know how to have a good time.”

These days, I fear, Tegucigalpa may be a happier place than Toledo.