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Dear Michael,

If you missed Bill Moyers’ new documentary Two American Families on PBS’s FRONTLINE Tuesday night, you missed a gem. But you can – and should – watch it online.

Since 1991, Moyers has been following the lives of two middle-class families — one black, one white — as they struggled to fulfill their “American Dream.” Moyers first featured the Stanleys and Neumanns in his 1992 documentary Minimum Wages: The New Economy. Moyers revisited the families again in 1995 for Living on the Edge and in 2000 for Surviving the Good Times.

Now, in Two American Families, Moyers ties together the families’ 1990’s economic struggles with an update on how the Stanleys and Neumanns are doing today. It is powerful and moving storytelling of average Americans who “worked hard and played by the rules” and still kept sinking deeper into poverty.

Alex Pareene writing in Salon: “The film doesn’t say so – it primarily just tells the story of these families – but all of these people are the victims not just of ‘the economy’ but of a series of specific policy decisions made, over the last few decades… Two American Families makes a pretty convincing case that if you weren’t born into the 1 percent, and a few things had gone wrong, there would’ve been no digging out for you, no matter how hard or for how long you worked.”

And in a piece we ran Tuesday titled Where the Hell Is the Outrage?, Richard Eskow wrote:

“Wealth inequity and other economic injustices are the product of deliberate policy choices – in taxation, Social Security, health care, financial regulation, education, and a number of other policy areas.  So why aren’t Americans taking action?”

“…Conditions continue to become objectively worse for the great majority of Americans. But these ongoing changes – in actual wages, in employment, in social mobility and wealth equity – have received very little media attention or meaningful political debate.”

“It’s not that things aren’t changing. It’s that people don’t know they’re changing. And without that knowledge the public becomes a canary in a coalmine, only aware of its declining oxygen supply when it keels over and dies.  It’s an almost classic state of alienation, in which people may be acutely aware of their own increasing difficulties (although sometimes they can be numb to that as well) but experience them in a state of isolation. That turns the anger inward, leading to crippling reactions like guilt and despair. And repeated individual failures – failures made increasingly likely in a skewed system – lead to a sense of learned helplessness.”

This film is depressing and it will piss you off; but it’s a must see. It is documentaries like Two American Families and journalists like Bill Moyers who can help show that it is flawed economic policy choices – not flawed individuals – that are failing millions of American families. It’s time to be outraged and turn that anger outward – not inward.

Watch Two American Families online at Bill Moyers’ website: http://billmoyers.com/2013/07/10/two-american-families/

Thanks,

Craig Brown
for the whole Common Dreams team

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