The Catholic Food-Pyramid and other Unstable Structures

Wow, having a hurt back makes me cranky. >,<

…Okay, so I’m also cranky because, to be frank, I’m seeing a lot less compassion and humility out in the wider world than I’d like, especially now, in times of, for many people, brick-shittingly scary times.

I say “wider world” because thankfully, most of the people I work with are incredibly compassionate — we all do things for free or at cost whenever we can. I think the constant exposure to the terrifyingly crappy luck so many people are having keeps us from getting too high up the horse.

A short while ago, I met an older couple and the granddaughter they’d adopted. He’s an active-duty Iraq vet heading back to Afghanistan soon. She’s a cancer patient whose, I kid you not, stress-levels are preventing her from having a necessary surgery. They can afford their house; they’ve been there a long time and his income is guaranteed. Three formal attempts by three different agencies to talk the bank into a modification failed. Maybe they want the house because it has equity; nobody knows. The expense of a lawyer is their only hope, and it’s slim.

There’s a man with nine kids whose wife lost her job, and they fell behind. She’s got another one now, but they don’t qualify for any of the programs, so they’re at the bank’s mercy. The bank has already said they won’t help.

There was a single woman with an autistic child. She took a buyout from the big three, then couldn’t find a job and ran out of savings. Her pension would start coming in six months, enough guaranteed income to easily make the payments. They wouldn’t wait. The autistic kid will have to adjust.

I’ve got a million of ‘em, there’s more every day, but I won’t torture you. Suffice to say that for the hundreds of people like those above that I’ve talked to, I’ve seen a total of maybe twenty irresponsible or stupid people who got into trouble, mostly from not planning for things like the possibility of losing income, or having enough cushion for things like medical emergencies.  (The health care crisis has been a dominant harmony in the whole thing, of course.)

People I’ve seen who lied to get their mortgage, or were involved in shady business?  Less than five.  About twice that many were treated blatantly illegally, either by their mortgage lenders or the broker who prepared their mortgage.

But everywhere I look there’s this vitreol, this stingy, arrogant blaming of the people who are hurting.  This obsession about “my money” going to help them out.  As if their financial failure makes them less as people, and now they don’t deserve compassion.  As if we shouldn’t have to help them; as if they’re not our countrymen, our families and neighbors.  (Of course, those who spew on about how awful and unjust it is to “bail out” homeowners tend to change their tunes if the crisis gets too close to home.)

Also, there’s very little acknowledgment of the following glaring facts:

• While homeowners had a personal responsibility to know how their mortgages worked and to be conservative in the amount they spent, lending banks, and Wall Street as a whole, had a professional responsibility, bought and paid for in the form of very handsome salaries, to know what they were lending and to enact the proper financial and ethical controls on the process, including of the securitization that led to the collapse.  They were licensed and entrusted to do exactly what they failed to do, landing us all in this mess.  Homeowners, by contrast, were sometimes a dumb, and very occasionally dishonest, and mostly ended up hurting themselves.
• The amount to bail out the banks and Wall Street will prove to be many hundreds of times any money spent to keep failed homeowners and their kids off the streets.

…I mean, it’s disturbing how infrequently I hear about those things, when you’d think they were the obvious soundbyte.  (But a big knock-you-over hug to The Daily Show for nailing them the other night.)

Anyway, yeah.  Bit cranky this week.  So much arrogance and skinflintyness and so little compassion and humility.  Aren’t most people around here Christians?  Aren’t those things kind of at the base of the whole Christian Food Pyramid??

*sigh*  I need some bad anime and decaf.  Here’s hoping I’m not too sore for crazy-early kungfu class tomorrow.  ‘Night!