CHARLES DICKENS knew something about hard times, and chose those very words as the title for one of his many novels. Living in a hard age, so many of Dickens’s characters — from Little Nell to Tiny Tim — were born into, lived under and often died from the harsh conditions of indifferent government institutions, merciless class distinctions and the all-consuming engine of the Industrial Revolution.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, too (himself a great admirer of the English novelist), knew about hard times, both in his fiction and his life. The conscience of his age, the great moralist experienced first-hand extreme poverty, bitter exile, even near-execution. Similarly, a recent reading of Byzantium, the brilliant three-volume history by John Julius Norwich, reminded me that for literally centuries the peoples of Europe knew hardly a season without famine, pestilence or one of the incessant waves of marauding hordes — Goths, Vandals, Huns, Romans. No matter; one sacking must have seemed pretty much like any other.

If all this seems long ago, we have the obscene statistic from the World Bank that today, in the 21st Century, some 2 billion people — a third of the Earth’s population — survive on less than the equivalent of $1 a day. And we have the even more obscene statistic from the United Nations Children’s Fund that more than 25,000 children under the age of 5 die each day from malnutrition and preventable disease (9.2 million in 1997).

But perhaps this is all too far away. As the sagacious English novelist and critic E.M. Foster once observed, such massive suffering is something that only the statisticians can quantify; our own capacity for comprehending suffering is (blessedly) more limited.

Nonetheless, we do not have to travel to distant places to find the poor. As the Bible tells us, they shall always be among us. And, indeed, they are. They are in our inner cities, of course, but they also in the sad shanty housing in the lesser parts of our otherwise middle-class neighborhoods. They are in our churches and our children’s classrooms. They are in the kitchens of our restaurants and in the crews of our lawn-care providers. In short, they are everywhere.

Occasionally we get a glimpse of the poor and the disenfranchised, but for the most part they are remarkably hidden from our view. It is no surprise that they should wish to seek refuge from the shame of recognition, as one might hide the frayed sleeve of an old shirt. But they are all around us, nonetheless.

Today millions upon millions of American who otherwise have never known adversity face conditions that they did not anticipate and, for most of us, did not imagine possible. Yes, we have some vague notion of the Great Depression, but that, too, was long ago and, until recently, seemed almost as much a matter of history as the sacking of Rome. Now, however, we have those painful monthly 401(k) statements that we dread to open, reminding us again and again that the money that we so diligently set aside for years, even decades, has suddenly disappeared to who knows where.

Clearly, there is a new sort of hard times in America today, one in which men and women who face the inevitable prospect of growing older (always a somewhat frightening process) now face the far more terrible prospect of growing older without sufficient resources. It is justifiable that we should feel some fear. Loss, in any form, is always accompanied by pain. But surely the question we must be asking ourselves is: What do we do now?

We as a people will be judged, and will judge ourselves, by how we respond individually and collectively to this adversity, which, after all, is merely the latest in the long history of mankind. Yes, for many, our choices have been limited, our lifestyles curtailed. We are reminded by countless newspaper articles and radio talk shows that we should “eat out less” — advice that would sound grotesquely comical to several billion hungry people worldwide. We are told we should lower our thermostats and cut back on the use of our fuel-consuming vehicles — something that even the most developed nations have long advocated. Hardships?

There is, to be sure, genuine suffering, and those who have true hardship — be it the loss of a home, lack of employment, insufficient food, or the like — deserve our compassion and help. For those who still can, this is a time for sharing, not hoarding. The food pantries are low; the aid agencies need our support. Difficult as it is to be generous in a time when we feel vulnerable, it is precisely the courage to do so that will return us to the path of financial — and spiritual — recovery. Now is the time to live up to our ideals. Now is the time to vanquish fear with conviction, each of us, one by one.

John Tessitore, an occasional contributor, is executive editor of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.