My reaction to “Two American Families”

 

We watched Frontline’s “Two American Families" recently. It traces two average—I guess you’d say lower-middle class—families from the 1980s to 2024.

When their good-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared in the ‘80s, they began working a long succession of jobs for far less wages than they’d received before, and far less security. The kind of part-time, no benefits jobs that many of the people who serve the public hold. It was a constant struggle for them to raise families, but both continued to work wherever and whenever they could. Somehow, sparks of hope and optimism seemed to keep alive in them, though it was tough. Now, approaching retirement ago, they know they will have to keep on working as long as they are able.

Theirs is a life I can hardly understand. I think they might be called “the working poor.” I don’t know how the jobs of the working poor are counted in employment stats, but I suspect many of the jobs that are so counted are the kinds they have held. Jobs, yes; but not jobs that provide adequately what people need to live in reasonable security.

Toward the end, three clips from Presidential Inaugural Addresses were shown—Obama, Trump, and Biden (I believe) all promising economies that would improve the lives of everyone. Yet the lives of these two American families had made no discernible steps forward.

Neither political party seems willing or able to make America work for the working men and women those families represent. Tax cuts to the wealthy do not trickle down to them. Putting the blame on immigrants his little basis in facts and stokes ethnic resentment. Taking their votes for granted generation after generation is using them, not helping them.

We could blame them for not getting the education they need for today’s economy. And there is something to be said for that. But it must be extraordinarily difficult to go to school while working as they must to keep food on the table and pay the mortgage and medical bills and all the rest. My educational opportunities came so easily to me that it would be hypocritical of me to tell them they, in their circumstances, can do the same as I did.

Maybe our politicians fail to address this kind of problem because America as a whole does not want it to be addressed. Maybe we who are more secure know deep down inside us that one reason for our comfortable positions in life is that the working poor make goods and services cheap for us, and we like that. We don’t demand change that would cost us something, so we don’t get it.

All I know is that people such as that documentary followed for forty years deserve better in this United States of America. They are honest, they are hard-working, and they are faithful to one another and to their family responsibilities. Who will do what needs to be done to give them a real chance to thrive? That’s what the electorate should be demanding to know as this fall’s election campaigns heat up.