“I thought of the last six months in Mississippi and my last week hitching rides with the burned out, beat up, fed up, but always kind and generous sector of society I’d never gotten to know until now. It was strange, I thought, how it was always the poor who picked us up. Our drivers weren’t the type who had happy families and middle-class upbringings like Sami and I had. The shiny SUVs or giant, bus-sized RVs would ride on past, but the worse the rattletrap, the more likely it was to pull over for us. Maybe it wasn’t strange at all. They lived lives with two feet planted in reality. Perhaps they didn’t hesitate to pick us up because they knew what it was like to be cold and hungry and away from home. They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were— in the ways that mattered most— far more civilized than the finely bred and carefully raised, for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden.”