Well, I didn't intend to go four days without posting, and my thanks to the 3 or 4 diehards who refuse to give up on me (especially my best friend J, who posted the flowerlude - and can we just say how beautiful his flower photos are - and wrote to make sure I wasn't dead).
I'm not dead... but I'm struggling. Some of it is.... well, personal, and I really won't be sharing it here (that's not my way); some of it is also personal, but part of the political scene as well. So I thought that would be as good a place as any to start.
As you might guess, since I talk about being a Starbuckian, my income is not what it once was, or what it needs to be. No disrespect to Howard intended, but it's hard to get by on a small hourly wage and the kindness of strangers (a/k/a tips). What started as a merely interesting moment of feeling somewhat strapped has gone on to a feeling of being generally destitute. And it's hard, not so much because of all the things I can't have or do - in the end, you come to appreciate that unnecessary things are, well, unnecessary - but because writing (when I am writing) is providing so much joy, it's hard to contemplate giving that up to chase extra income.
So Saturday, I didn't write because Jennifer and I were traipsing around my nab, window shopping... which was very nice, as we both try to enjoy a new spirit of "look, but don't buy", and really, that makes for an entertaining afternoon trying on sky-high Ferragamo shoes at Nieman Marcus. It was blazing hot, and eventually, the whole day was lost to travel and meeting people, and when I ultimately got home it was too late to really blog effectively.
Sunday, I worked, and that's where I - and my co-worker - discovered this awful story on the front page of the Times, Gretchen Morgenson's admirable attempt to tie together the corporate interests in the debt crisis with an actual individual story. That the story itself was incredibly sad (and a little predictable), only made the sense of identification all the more vivid. A single mom who got herself way too deep in debt, it looks as though she will lose everything... and still owe on her debts.
And she's not alone. I think the story affected me more deeply than I first thought, because the idea of even writing about it stranded me for another day. Until this morning when I saw David Brooks follow up on his "debt culture" column with another, fairly dead-on assessment of the problem:
On the front page of Sunday’s Times, Gretchen Morgenson described
Diane McLeod’s spiral into indebtedness, and now a debate has erupted
over who is to blame.
Some people emphasize the
predatory lenders who seduced her with too-good-to-be-true credit lines
and incomprehensible mortgage offers. Here was a single mother made
vulnerable by health problems and divorce. Working two jobs and
stressed, she found herself barraged by credit card companies offering
easy access to money. Mortgage lenders offered her credit on the basis
of the supposedly rising value of her house. These lenders had little
interest in whether she could pay off her loans. They made most of
their money via initial lending fees and then sold off the loans to
third parties.
In short, these predatory companies swooped
down on a vulnerable woman, took what they could and left her careening
toward bankruptcy.
Other people emphasize McLeod’s own
responsibility. She is the one who took the credit card offers knowing
that debt is a promise that has to be kept. After her divorce, she went
on a shopping spree to make herself feel better. After surgery, she sat
at home watching the home shopping channels, charging thousands more.
Free societies depend on individual choice and responsibility, those in
this camp argue. People have to be held accountable for their
indulgences or there is no justice. As McLeod herself admirably told
Morgenson: “I regret not dealing with my emotions instead of just
shopping.”
If you go to the online comment section affixed to
Morgenson’s article, you see advocates of these two positions talking
past one another, one side talking the morality of social protection
and the other the morality of personal responsibility.
Brooks goes on to argue that there's a third way to look at this: that our culture helped make being in debt seem the norm, made consumption the objective (mass luxury), and changed our decision making and our behaviors. It';s a way of saying... we all bear some responsibility in this.
I suspect many people will be put off by Brooks - he's already got a passionate set of detractors - but I think this is a moment where he's getting it right: finding the center, and saying that as much as anything, we need to be a better society made up of better people with a better value system. That's going to seem, to many on the left especially, like a moral judgment about people like Diane McLeod. But the point is... we are all like Ms. McLeod.
The problem with the debt and mortgage crisis story, I've thought all along, is that it brings out the distinction makers - "I didn't do that," "that's not me," "those people should have known better." Myself. I think people who amassed massive credit card debt really should have known better, but with mortgages I think many people were swindled by banks and lenders who did not explain in enough detail what these mortgages meant to people who did not understand what they were signing on for. But in any case, what's already happening is that, on the margins, in the shadows... people are starting to lose everything. And if we don't get conscious to the problem soon, we will all be facing it.
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