Here's a tale probably told many millions of times, all over the country, throughout this slump:
ON June 25, 2010, Frederick Deare punched out for the last time from his job driving a forklift at the Old London factory in the Bronx. That summer, everyone at the plant was being laid off: the oven operators, the assembly-line packers, the forklift drivers, the sanitation workers. Total jobs lost: 228. Old London, the snack manufacturer that invented the Cheez Doodle, was moving its operations to North Carolina. At 53, Mr. Deare, known as Freddy or Teddy Bear to his co-workers, would have to find a new job.
Read on to see what it's like to be 53 years old and looking for work in this environment, what it does to a person. This was a man who had worked hard his whole life to attain a comfortable middle class life. The quote in the title is the soothing words his wife would say to him when he was rejected by yet another employer. It's a harrowing story of a good person, upstanding citizen caught in the maw of this awful economy.