Our society has become this perverse ME-Fest where everyone is too busy stoking their own egos to give a damn about what is really going on in the world. What’s it going to take to get the buffers to wake up? Even the terrorist attacks of 9-11 only had a short term impact. You couldn’t find a flag to steal they were selling so fast for the year afterward. The news media was afraid to say anything that might be construed as unpatriotic, and the masses condemned anyone that chose to disagree with our Commander In Chief. Remember when the Dixie Chicks were cool, and then they weren’t and then it comes to our attention that our government acted on incorrect intelligence, and then the Dixie chicks became cool again? Yeah. That timeline sort of illustrates how long such a horrific attack had an effect on the general masses. As long as you aren’t traveling by air, or trying to take pictures of a landmark, the antiterrorism laws haven’t adversely affected many of us, and the majority of us seem to be lulled back into this false sense of security that all is well.
Something has to give. People need to wake up to the fact that big business, corrupt politicians, and the credit industry at large are screwing us. They get together, construct laws so involved and confusing that the news media doesn’t get to fully disclose all the things that the new laws that just passed mean to you and I. All these special appropriations, and committees for this and panels for that. It’s like they just want to clarify to the lobbyists whom it is that they need to get in bed with. They tuck this and that on the back pages of the bill, and we the people end up buns up and kneeling. The shareholders of the major corporations just keep raking it in faster than the can figure out how to blow it, and it seems like politics is only a short stop before going on to run some foundation, a book deal, or to run a corporation, where it seems like the only thing that any of us should ever strive to be is a CEO. Doesn’t matter what field you look at, it seems like they all have these umbrella deals where they can do nothing constructive and still walk away after only a few years with more money than you or I could ever hope to figure out how to spend in two lifetimes. And then what? Six months later, they are signing a deal with some other corporation with yet another umbrella clause big enough to cover the Astrodome.
Shit. If one of my kids seems to be totally corrupt of morals and a conscious, I’ll encourage them in any way I can to become a CEO for just a few years at least. The whole family could retire for generations to come at that point. That’s just what we need. Another generation of fabulously wealthy bastards that don’t know anything outside of feeling entitled. It seems to be what we all strive for. Everyone seems to want to be rich. Filthy Rich. They don’t pause very long to think about what will become of their monies or how it may affect the lives of their decedents for generations to come. We’ve all come to view in contempt the idea of the trust fund baby, yet we all we want to be rich. Why? Why do you want all that money? What you going to do with it? Build that tree house you always wanted? Buy a Limo? A cabin on a lake? Your own private island? To what end? What good is any of it? Do you feel a sense of satisfaction when you go to bed on your $5000 mattress, with your 300 thread count linen sheets when you know that right here in the United States Thousands of Children are going to bed hungry and neglected by their parents who feel like they are doing the right thing by working twelve hours a day six days a week to provide for their kids? That’s not to mention the millions that live in abject poverty all around the rest of the world. Does driving a $70k SUV make you feel good about yourself as you pass by forgotten neighborhoods where you could have bought TWO houses for that much? Can you honestly justify paying $3000 for a television? $2000 for purebred dog that you can not train because you are working too much, and it ends up crapping all over your house when there are thousands of dogs put to sleep every day in shelters all across the country? $1500 for a laptop for you kid; when within ten miles of your home are countless children that don’t have $20 to spend on school supplies? Our public school systems are failing our children across the land, and it seems like so many people’s solution is to take their kids out of the underperforming schools and either move to an area with better schools or pay to put them in private school while less fortunate families are forced to stay put and deal with substandard schools.
It’s all a self consuming all absorbing vicious cycle that once you fall prey to, a family can spend generations trying to get out from underneath. It’s sad, and it’s wrong, and I wish that people would wake up to this. It seems like for generations, there has been this idea ingrained into us that as we become more financially successful, we should move from where we live out to the suburbs. We have taken this idea to the extreme. People have started to abandon the original ring suburbs in many metropolitan areas for suburbs even farther out. When people hear that you live in an area where the schools are poor, or there are crime problems, the first thing they want to know is why don’t you move? Why should I move? I’m not the problem. Why should I be forced to give up what I have here and move on to an unknown? What if things aren’t good there, or start to decline? Should I pick up and move again? Where do you draw the line? How many times should I have to pick up and move on because of a less savory element? By doing so, aren’t I giving in to them? Aren’t they the ones that are winning as they are actually losing out? When are people going to take a stand for their neighborhoods and communities? How much do you have to spend for a home before people are willing to take a stand to keep out the crime and negative elements? Should there even be a dollar amount on such a thing? Don’t elderly and the less fortunate deserve to live in safe communities? By buying in to the notion that you have to spend a king’s ransom to get into an area where the criminals can’t afford to be is self defeating. Don’t you think the criminals recognize this concentration of wealth? What if we all spent a little less on our homes, and a little more on fostering a sense of community amongst your fellow neighbors? Do I sound ready to run a commune?
Please people. Come to your senses. Realize that we all can’t keep livin’ the way we’ve been livin’. We’ve all got to step back, evaluate, and make some decisions about what it truly important to us. None of it matters if we don’t have a planet to do it on because we’ve burned up every last ounce of fossil fuel as we decimate the ozone layer. We all have to make drastic changes in how we conduct our day to day affairs in an attempt to save the planet and each other.
I walk around Target or K-Mart in amazement of the perceived “value” of all this crap that doesn’t make a bit of difference at the end of the day. Towels in like 50 colors. Same thing for flip flops. All the little bottles of stuff to put on your face and hair and ass acne. All the little bottles with their $15 price tags. No I’m sorry shelf tags, because they are too freaking cheap to put prices on stuff anymore. All the clothes, and ugly cheap ass plastic furniture they think you should pollute your dorm room with in an attempt to make the other sheep think you are one of them. It just blows my mind. I swear, I think I’d be just fine during a major crisis, but I could have a full blown freak out right in the middle of an otherwise peaceful discount outlet. I just want to wander through the store with my own price gun (yes, I have one) and mark the stuff that I see as unnecessary as “CRAP.” OMG We are buying ourselves into environmental apocalypse. Have you noticed this? It seems like everyday, the stuff in the stores just gets a little cheesier and little more like a cheap facsimile of what it used to supposed to be. You will know that Armageddon has arrived when the whole planet looks like the landfill fell over on it. That’s all that will be left. The packaging from this crap that we don’t need is going to overtake us if the crap itself doesn’t first.
Look at self storage. It is inherently evil at its core. I can’t wait to own one. It’s like the captains of industry’s whorehouse. Really. They brainwash you into buying the biggest house you can afford, to stuff it full of “possessions” and when it’s not big enough to hold your booty any longer get a bigger house. Oh, can’t afford a bigger house, and don’t want to deal with your shopping addiction we’ve spoon fed you into? There’s a simple solution to that. Go rent some space in this big metal shed that you seem to think the MICE don’t know about, and then move all those pesky belongings that are in your way over here and pay us a king’s ransom to keep up with them for you while you pay the credit card payments for all of it.
But I’m supposedly the crazy one.
We are sort of screwed right now. We thought we had our shit in order well enough to look into a mortgage. I don’t know how much attention you’ve paid to the business news, the stock market, and the mortgage industry, but what has happened is that the funds for risky mortgages have dried up. A mortgage broker finds someone to loan you the money. Then, the lump your mortgage with others, and then sell the whole package to an investor willing to wait the term for the payoff. They’ll loan you $100k, and then show the investors the $$$ they will make when you pay it off in 30 yrs. They end up selling it off for a fraction of the money that could be made in the long run. They used to lump these shaky ones in with the good ones, and people didn’t worry too much about the few that were going belly up because it was such a low percentage. The numbers went up, the investors stopped buying packages with shaky loans in them, and the banks and mortgage brokers that sold them are left holding the bag. All these houses are getting foreclosed. The banks now own them, and can’t sell them because the mortgage market has gotten so bad that they won’t talk to anyone with less than stellar credit. No one can get mortgages, which means they can’t buy the houses that are on the market. The house values are about to take another big drop because no one can get financed to buy them. The ultra rich and those with good credit are going to snap all these houses cheap, and the general population will have no choice but to rent them.
Look at your life and economize. Consider what you are doing and how you are spending the money that you treasure enough to give up so much of your time to earn it, and ask yourself what you really need and what is truly important. You may find that it’s not what the media is trying to sell you. Life is fleeting. A well lived one is short enough; and to live one cut short is to die unfulfilled. Look for the things that matter in your life and capitalize on them. Leave the working 2 jobs and struggling under a mortgage on a house that your seldom home to enjoy and the thousands of dollars of interest payments to the sheep that fall into the mechanism of the machine.
Learn to use your money to make you more money before you simply spend it. Make a goal and figure out how to achieve it. Look at your income, and ask yourself how much can you generate off of it before you have to spend it? That is going to mean different things to different people. It may simply mean letting your money sit in an interest bearing savings account until you need to spend it, or those more adventuresome ones, it may mean investing in the stock market, real estate, or one of your buddies crazy schemes that just might hit. It is mostly a matter of the money that is left over after you have to pay bills. At the very least, you can leave that money in an interest bearing account until you need to write the checks. If you are creative, you may consider looking for lost treasures at flea markets, garage sales and auctions to resell either on eBay, or in an antique mall or consignment shop. If you have money that you can afford to have tied up for a longer period of time, consider stocks or real estate. Right now, I think real estate prices are going to get worse before they get better. Depending on your market, today might not be the day to buy. These are decisions you’ll have to make for yourself after careful analysis of the facts for your individual situation and geographic region. While many people have gotten rich in the last decade buying and selling houses on the fly, I think that the mortgage industry slowdown has all of a sudden turned real estate into a long term run for maximum payoff.
Right now, my personal budget is pretty stretched. I don’t have the funds to be able to stick them into anything very long term or very risky either. The best I can do it stry to roll it over before in the time between when it hits in the account and the due date of the bill that it is actually earmarked for. I recognize that this is a risky strategy, but sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures. Just be careful or you’ll find your lights shut off.
I guess that if you really boil it all down, what I am trying to get across is you have to live life today, but you got to be thinking about tomorrow.
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