Story pick: A middle class life, unraveled

We’ve all thought it. I can always get another job. Worst-case scenario, my schooling and experience should be worth something, right?

Wil Haygood’s story on the front page of The Washington Post today does a brilliant job of rattling that notion. Through telling details, such as how a woman who once wore high heels now stands in “soft-soled shoes," he masterfully takes us into the life of an unemployed nursing executive who could be any of us. A woman, who as he writes, is now looked at “with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I gaze.”

Find Haygood's article here. Also, check out Michael Williamson's incredible photo gallery.

(Side note: In the four months Michael Williamson and I traveled the country together to cover the recession, we were constantly looking to show how the middle class had been impacted. To our surprise, we ended up finding the most stark example here in the D.C. area, in a Woodbridge homeless shelter, in the form of Ron Vazquez, a man struggling to accept that his family had gone from a house to a room).