FOOD FOR THOUGHT: IS AMERICA BEYOND REPAIR?

Bob Herbert, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America (New York: Doubleday, 2014) ("The twenty-first century has not been kind to the middle class in America. The economic nightmare that descended . . . was part of an epic change in the lives of individuals and families across the country. Millions of hardworking men and women who had believed they were solidly anchored economically found themselves cast into a financial abyss, struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcy. Some were astonished to find themselves turning to food banks and homeless shelters. The hard times would eventually spread like a blight across the country, wiping out saving, crushing home values and upending carefully nurtured career plans. For much of the population, the very notion of economic security evaporated." "[] The years that had been unkind to the middle class were positively brutal to the working class and the poor. The United States was no longer a place of widely shared prosperity and limitless optimism. It was a country that had lost it way." Id. at 1-2. Also see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, "Country at a Crossroads," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/9/2014.).