Less Than Zero

One in seven Americans are now living in poverty. That's what the census tells us. That means people are living on eleven thousand dollars a year for an individual under sixty-five or twenty-two thousand for a family of four. The good news, if there is any, is that experts had expected that number to be even higher. Experts who make more than twenty-two thousand dollars a year.
It set off the alarm that sometimes rings in my head when I'm riding my bike through the streets of the city. The one that gets me to scan the neighborhood for apartments for rent. The one that makes me consider my lifestyle. How close am I to dropping my family below the line? There are plenty of clever, qualified folks out there staving off the inevitable while they look for their next meaningful employment. The idea that one in seven people in our country is happily waiting around for their welfare check or looking for some angle to make their lifestyle work.
On the flip-side, I continue to imagine how I can move a few dollars here and there so that I can go out and buy the newest version of Guitar Hero. Embarrassing priorities. Choices I can make when I'm not that seventh person. Instead, I could be moving that shopping cart down the street in the early morning hours, looking for that bin full of last night's party: glass and aluminum that I can load up and haul to the recycling center. I remember watching a husband and wife team work both sides of a street. She would run ahead, scouting for the mother lode, while he crushed and stacked in their borrowed Safeway cart. It made me wonder if we got my son up early enough to get into the act if my wife and I could put food on the table before the sun went down. The statistics only say that one in seven live below that poverty line. That means there is still plenty of room before zero, and none of it is comfortable.