I spend a lot of time discussing a lot of political topics. There are a lot of things that you can suss out when you talk to people, but one of them is the difference in experience from person to person, and place to place.

I was privileged to be born to a family that was hardworking and proud, and I was never on the streets or really homeless even though I've occasionally been kind of broke.

This segment of 60 minutes, shot in 2011, shows a kind of life that I never led, but I was acutely aware of even back then.

See, I was watching the news, and reading the net even back then, and I knew how terrible the economy was. When I look back at the depths of the Great Recession, I look at a period when over 30 million American citizens didn't have work, and were unemployed for many, many months on end.

 

I have been running into two competing mentalities with respect to life in the USA. Some people believe that if you are willing to work hard anything is possible, and others that there is just not enough work to go around. I'm somewhere in the middle, in the sense that I really think that you can work hard and do well, but some people won't be hired to do that. They'll have to do it themselves. And not everyone is equipped to hustle day in, and day out, to make money.

It's scary to live in an America where there aren't guarantees, as the children interviewed for this story recount. This is the life that doesn't make it into the Hollywood films, and you won't see on TV. But for the bottom of the US economy, it was all too real.
Even though things have improved somewhat, we still aren't back to the prosperity that I grew up surrounded by.