Absolutely, we had on NRK our national broadcaster a program by Thomas Seltzers who was born in America and moved to Norway in the 70s. He thought he had come to the Soviet Union when he arrived. At the time the US was a place of optimism and upward mobility and opportunity.

When he went back now in the age of Trump, visiting family and traveling across, I must say it was an extremely bleak landscape we saw. Thomas Seltzers himself was just shocked to the core many times. Like he was just staring out in disbelief. There was so many towns and places he had known which had basically collapsed. Lack of jobs. No futures. Drug abuse. Meth, opioids you name it.

The life of his relatives who stayed behind as rather bleak and frankly extremely depressive for us here in Norway to watch.

So many of these guys he met were working 2-3 jobs, burning the light in both ends. He met people tanking drugs just to keep up the pace with all the hard work and long days.

When I watch these documentaries what strikes me is that there is still some much wealth in America but it is so badly distributed and organized. Like many people have nice houses, decent cars etc, but they always seem to be one paycheck away from collapse.

It seems like America has all the resources it needs to be an awesome society, but the ability to make that choice has been taken away from people by a dysfunctional political system and and extremely deep running distrust and cynicism. It is hard to move forward if people have not trust or faith in each other. When society becomes triablist.