The Real Culprit

It’s all the fault of the free-market deregulators. No, no, it’s all the fault of the greedy, sub-prime mortgage lenders. Un unh, it’s those rapacious speculators who played the market like slick Enron gamers. Wrong again, it was the sickeningly usurious banks and Wall Street geeks who shuffled around bundles of crappy mortgage-backed securities from one institutional dupe to another. Think again, John and Jane Public, it’s all because China got too filthy rich, and dumped a gazillion dollars into U.S. markets, thereby inflating, and devaluing, and doing whatever it is that they did to bring financial ruin to the world. Let’s see, has anyone been left out? Oh yes! It’s the credit industry, the credit mentality, the buy it now, pay for it…whenever, virus that’s infected Americans for the last half-century. It’s the entitlement mongers. It’s you, and me, and the rest of the 95% of us who don’t make $3 million bucks a year, and don’t care if we’re in debt up to our nostrils. Of course, it was all OUR FAULT!

Oh, it’s so simple. How could we have not known it was all our doing – this whole financial meltdown? It was us! We wanted houses, and cars, and colleges for our kids, and medical care, and wage increases, and vacations, and, you know, all those outrageous extravagances, like food and shelter and clothes, and so forth. Greedy, bad, welfare-grubbing, no-account Americans who want government to coddle them and buy them lunch. Now we know who got us, 95% of us anyway, into this mess. It’s our own something-for-nothing, screw-you-I’ve-got-mine, nothing-counts-but-me, you know, human nature. How could we not have seen that?

So, okay, what are we going to do about it? Everyone knows you can’t change human nature. Well, everyone except evangelicals and psychoanalysts. Left to our own devices, we humans are a brutal, aggressive, club-wielding lot only out for our own survival. If you don’t believe me go to any playground. It’s horrifying. They don’t call it a jungle gym for nothing. All right, all right, we know it was us and our unbridled, ego-driven human natures who are responsible for THE CRASH. Does that mean it’s all hopeless and we’ll be living out the Mad Max scenario for the next millennia?

Of course not fellow (by nature) miscreants. Like the (nausea inducing) song says, “ We will survive.” Sure there’ll be a few rough years - cardboard box housing, bread and ketchup dinners, dumpster-diving employment, - but we’re Americans! We’ll bounce back! We always do. We may have to forego some of the luxuries for a while – jobs, housing, food, that kind of stuff, - but we’ll be back stronger than ever. We rebounded bigger and better from other crashes, and this one’s no different. The Dow will rise again, new funding will ride in from somewhere, we’ll be able to borrow our brains out once again, and, and…we’ll probably repeat the whole circus again sometime down the line. It’s human nature.