She stooped for a stone and dropped it down.'Fancy being where that is now,' she said, peering into the blackness; 'fancy going round and round like a mouse in a pail, clutching at the slimy sides, with the water filling your mouth, and looking up to the little patch of sky above.''You had better come in,' said Benson, very quietly. 'You are developing a taste for the morbid and horrible.' ("The Well")

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?

These poor people have learned to endure day to day economic agony. It__ routine in daily life for them. They are so accustomed to facing economic pain that poverty doesn__ hurt them anymore. Extreme negativity in their life drove learning endurance and their accomplishment to endure extreme conditions is __ositivity_ they mastered

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

A Man's management of his own purse speaks volumes about character