I came across an article on the panic and sense of fear and loss that middle-to-upper-middle-class baby boomers are experiencing now that the rug has been pulled out from under them: their retirement funds that were invested in the stock market have shrunk, and the value of their homes, their most valuable asset, has also gone down considerably. It’s a good article, written with insight and nuance, but I couldn’t help thinking about the picture missing so glaringly from its analysis. Surely, counting on a comfortable retirement and then seeing it slip away must be hard, but what about not having ever had any possibility of one?

For most people who weren’t counting on a paycheck from Lehman Brothers, the central drama of the 2008 collapse has been the more personal matter of their retirement savings and their property value. And with it, the prospect of a non-penurious old age, the basic reward for a life of hard work suddenly seems embattled. So much for all those ideas of affluent freedom, all those TV ads featuring Harley-riding healthy seniors, after leaving the 9-to-5 behind. That rug has been yanked away. But how to say farewell?

And it’s not just one article. The mainstream news media has only one story to tell: people who had been living relatively comfortable lives now are threatened with losing their good-paying jobs, their stock portfolios, and their homes (or much of their home’s previous value). But what about the poor, who had none of those to begin with? They weren’t in the news before the current economic downturn, when they were struggling, and they’re not often in the news now, still struggling and the hardest hit: the loss of a job or a home is much greater catastrophe for someone who has no cushion to fall back on. The relatively wealthy are not the majority, yet the story of the poor and even of the median earner, who takes home about $25,000 a year, is not being told, at least not very widely.

According to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the poor in the US are worse off now that they were in past recessions, because the aid available to poor families and individuals at both the State and Federal levels has been reduced or eliminated over the last several decades. Not only are only 40% of eligible families receiving assistance through TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is half the percentage that received help from its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, (which was eliminated during the Clinton administration), but unless they qualify for unemployment, adults who are not raising children don’t qualify for any type of cash assistance at all. Many are not even eligible for food stamps.

More people will fall into poverty and deep poverty as the recession grows. Yet government is focused on giving money to Wall Street firms and banks, which, even if one were to buy the argument that those institutions will then extend loans which will keep businesses going so they can continue to employ people, it’s an awfully indirect way to help the people who need help the most. And it will be of no benefit to those who already don’t have a job or were only partially or occasionally employed to begin with.

If the loss of a previous sense of security and prosperity creates, for relatively-affluent baby boomers “a kind of vertiginous feeling, like stepping out a window in your childhood home only to realize that the balcony that’s been there all your life is gone,” what feeling does the loss of the basic means of survival create for those who have been perennially on the edge of that open window with no balcony in sight?