Meanwhile, outside the political class, real people give their own money to help a teacher of poor children

There are people in this country who actually have real problems. They don’t use them as an excuse to bash others or to play victim. They just keep their heads down and try to do the best they can. One such person is Kimberly Bermudez, the 27-year-old teacher of many impoverished children at charter school in Chicago. Recently on a flight to Florida, she was telling a fellow passenger about how difficult the lives of some of her children are – often going hungry or doing without other needs – and how teachers and administrators at the school routinely spend their own money to help with basic necessities for the children.

She wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t blaming anyone. She was just telling her story. Now if you’ve flown at all, you know there is really no privacy on an airplane, and people overheard her story. They recognized her sincerity and her earnestness, and they wanted to help. And boy, did they:

Soon after her conversation, Bermudez told the Post she felt a tap on her shoulder from a passenger holding a baby behind her. The passenger apologized for eavesdropping before handing her a stack of $100 bills. “Do something amazing,” the passenger told her. “I said, ‘You have no idea how much this means. Whether it’s books or backpacks, I’ll make sure I give something to the children,’ ” she said to the Post. After the plane landed in Jacksonville, Fla., a man across from her in the aisle, who had also overheard her story, handed her $20 for her students. And then a passenger in front of her turned around and gave her $10. Bermudez told the publication she began to cry at the generosity. “I said, ‘I’m not here to solicit money; I really am here on this plane just to see my parents,” she recalled saying. “And one of them said, ‘I know. That’s why we’re giving it to you. Use your voice. Use your gift of talking.’ ” Bermudez said she waited until after her mom picked her up at the airport to count the money — $530.

We have a political class in this country that calls people stingy and selfish if they don’t want to pay more in taxes. Yet look at what the people on this plane did. They willingly handed over $530 of their own money just to help children they don’t know and will never meet. Why would they do that? They do it because there’s a huge difference between helping someone who’s really in the trenches making a difference . . . and giving your money to a politician who promises that if you “pay into the system” it will somehow benefit others. We’ve seen for long enough how the “system” works. People can do more good with their own money than they can handing it over to Washington, whether that means giving it away or investing it in something that elevates people’s quality of life. And the most important lesson to learn from this is that people are happy to give, as long as they know the giving is going to do real good. People could tell from what they saw of Kimberly Bermudez that she would honor their generosity by doing well with it. Americans are generous. Americans are also not stupid. They can tell the difference between a worthy cause and a scam that masquerades as one. We need more Kimberly Bermudezes out there, and if we had that, people would gladly get behind them.

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