A time apart, to rest and reflect

As I write this, it's Sunday mid-afternoon. After a particularly hideous night dealing with local trash at the waterpark/hotel where Christopher works, and a week of dealing with the wreckage of the past at the condo on my part, we decided a rather-spontaneous "vacation day" was in order.

So we slept in, drowsing and listening to the excellent "Sunday Jazz Brunch" (8-12 noon Sundays on the local 101.5 - The River), then loaded up his mountain-bike and my PC and got in his truck to ride north.

We journeyed along the wooded areas around Toledo to see the beginnings of fall colors - to revel in God's magnificent skill with a color-palette. From there, we drove to near Brighton, MI to Island Lake State Park. There are a pair of particularly wonderful mountain-biking trails there, and a chance for me to sit down and just mentally detox. While Chris is off riding, I am here at the trailhead, writing, reading, and enjoying a beautiful day of "Indian-summer."

It's been a draining week.

Chris made his decision, last week, that he was just pushing too hard to try to get to his dream jobs - which are out there, sometime in the future, but not on the immediate horizon (pardon the pun). As I posted earlier, the dream is not dead - but the economy seems to have ensured that it is deferred, at least for now. So that was one emotionally-charged decision made last week.

In the midst of that decision, it became clear that we needed to make a decision about what we as a couple were going to do above our living arrangement. While Chris' one-bedroom apartment is comfortable for one, it's pretty close-quarters for two on an ongoing basis. But the lease runs through December, and the one lone nibble we had on subletting it crumbled about the same time we decided not to go to Champaign. But shuttling back and forth between the condo (where my internet connection was, thus where I had to work) and the apartment (which has become "the rest of my life") was getting increasingly obnoxious, now that Sue and Jeff are mostly out of the place.

So this week, it was my turn to start moving out. We got a larger storage unit - to store what I would keep once we had a 2 bedroom apartment, and moved from our former unit to the new one. I'm glad to see that the winnowing-down process we've been doing is finally showing progress - it only took us about 2 hours to move stuff out of the old holding-cell into the new.

I finally got new cable/internet/phone at the apartment on Friday. Once I knew the online connection was working, I started the process of changing his address to "our" address. We will stay in this place until springtime, and then start the process of looking for something more permanent - work and residence-wise.

(It's been pretty clear that the relationship had reached "permanent" status a while ago.)

A recurring theme over the last weeks has been to pick out the few books that I would want to keep with me during the five-to-six month stay in the storage-deprived apartment. Here's a few from my list:

• Wounded Prophet by Michael Ford - a excellent biography of one of my spiritual mentors, Henri Nouwen
• The Wounded Healer and Return of the Prodigal Son, the classic texts by Nouwen
• Ragamuffin Gospel and Abba's Child by Brennan Manning - number two in my "spiritual mentors" trinity
• Messy Spirituality and Dangerous Wonder, by Mike Yaconelli - with great thanks to Renee' Altson - completing my "earthly trinity"
• Gentle Closings: How To Say Goodbye to Someone You Love, The Gentle Closings Companion, and Where Is Heaven? Children's Thoughts on Death and Dying all by Ted Menten - better than most of the pastoral-care books I've read, so far
• In Ordinary Time by Roberta Bondi - a great one when it seems like God's voice has gone silent, and
• stumbling toward faith, a classic of faith despite every reason not to have it, by Renee Altson

There's more in the box, but they aren't leaping to mind.

I had to give up on the music-digitizing process, for now. At some point, I will have to replace the CD/DVD drive in the desktop - it's clearly starting to fail, because the error-correction routines are slowing the process way, way down. But there's four boxes of books to go, and a box and a half of CDs - 2 boxes of books and about 3/4 box of CDs each to the church and the local public library.

Interestingly enough, there is a large ELCA congregation in Maumee, to whom I originally offered my resources - but their education/library director never bothered to return my repeated calls. Epiphany Lutheran in Toledo is smaller, but hosts a half-dozen AA groups a week, and was the start of my journey back to faith - and their Christian education director was ecstatic when she got the last delivery. So, it's sad, but it's a case of "who loves ya, baby?"

The Toledo-Lucas County Public Library is one of the gems of living in Toledo. While I can't speak to their staffing situations (their management caused my former wife and a lot of library professionals unspeakable agony back in the late 80's), they seem to have come light-years in the collection and technology departments. The ability to browse their collection online, including ALL of their music and video offerings, and to request items to a local branch in a day or two, brings them right up there with library systems four and five times their size. (When we were looking at moving to Champaign, one of the big down-sides to the move would have been the differences in the public libraries). So I am very glad to be able to send some of my books home to them - either to their collection or their book-sale, I don't know (and don't care) which.

The thing that pains me is some of the big stuff, which is really worthwhile, which we can't sell because of the no-garage-sales clause in the condo association, and I really hate to just give away because they're too good NOT to get some value from them. And I can't bring myself to just give them away - although that may very well be what happens in the end, because I'm not moving this crap again.

I like the idea of FreeCycle, but getting a thousand emails a day (only a mild exaggeration) is a frustration. So we will start with CraigsList, and move to FreeCycle after that. We have two or three weeks to get it out - two would be preferable. It would be very nice to be done by Reformation Day, October 31st....

There are a hundred other topics I need (and want) to write about -

• the housing crisis (which has not stopped being a crisis, even though the stock market and credit crunch has vastly overshadowed it)
• the credit crunch - and how it may finally bring about the death of conspicuous consumption (albeit too late to really help anyone)
• how we are going to teach an entire generation (or two) the difference between "needs" and wants - and if it will take an honest-to-God Great Depression to make it stick
• why an awful lot of people of deep-and-abiding faith continue to ditch The Institutional Church; and
• living between Death and Resurrection - and why most churches don't recognize Easter Saturday when it happens in October.

On the first two topics, there are still an awful lot of people who are asking, "How the hell did we get here?" I'd like to recommend three very powerful, very informative stories - each will take about an hour of your time, and each one is absolutely worth it:

• Chicago Public Radio's This American Life has done two very insightful, powerful programs on the economy - "The Giant Pool of Money (talking about the fundamentals of the housing crisis) and "Another Really Scary Program About The Economy. Both should be required listening - especially if you think you know what caused the whole sub-prime crisis.


• Dick Gordon's The Story on NPR had a particularly powerful program called "Blowing The Whistle" (click on the link to go to the archive to listen). The second half of the program is an interview with Bill Thornton, a real-estate appraiser who had to get out of the business because his practice of giving reasonable appraisals didn't support the housing-market insanity. For 20 years, he was a home appraiser. But as prices climbed during the housing boom, lenders stopped calling him. Yet when he recently heard how Wall Street helped create the housing and financial meltdown, he realized that losing his business wasn't exactly his fault.

Powerful, painful, and yet so informative. I'd really, really recommend you set aside an hour to listen to the first two, and a half hour to listen to "The Story."

It might just open your mind to some new ideas about what's been happening...

Time for a dose of rigorous honesty...

For years, I have felt increasingly out of touch with American culture, even as I have felt guilty about being infected by it, to some degree. It started with the wrench in values that said that you weren't having fun going to the prom unless you arrived in a $160-an-hour limousine. It spread to the concept that killing a human being in high-school to steal their Starter jacket or designer sneakers somehow became acceptable. (We won't even talk about the acceptability of $175 tennis shoes...)

It accelerated when we bought the lie that "we are what we drive" - so it made perfect sense for a four-foot-ten woman who weighed 96 pounds to be driving a Chevy Suburban to work - alone - "because it makes me feel safe." Or that somehow Hummers and Expeditions and Land Rovers (not to mention Ram or F150 pickups with enough horsepower to pull a hundred-year-old tree-stump out of the ground) were suddenly de rigueur for the commute through the wilderness of our downtown parking garages...

And suddenly you couldn't be caught dead buying a house without a Corian kitchen countertop. And then, in no time at all, anyone who "settled" for Corian instead of marble or granite may just as well have stuck down self-adhesive carpet tiles in the foyer, too. The idea of a $50,000 SUV parked in front of a $400,000 house with a $60,000 kitchen seemed, well, completely acceptable to some folks...

But I was absolutely astonished - hell, beyond astonished - to hear the May 6th announcement that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were providing special mortgage availability for what they called "jumbo mortgages ... for people who wanted to obtain mortgages up to $729,000!!

When the hell did it become necessary to ensure that people could get government help to buy a three-quarter-million dollar house??

I realize that I and my family, however, are also part of the problem. I myself labor under the weight of stupid, stupid consumer debt. My sister and brother-in-law were sold a mortgage they could just barely support, long-term. They were encouraged to take an adjustable-rate mortgage, even though the initial payment was at the absolute outside edge of what they could afford - let alone any rate adjustment in 2-1/2 years. Common sense would have said they couldn't do it - but everyone else was, and "it'll all work out..."

Then my sister got injured, and her cost-conscious employer ushered her out de' do' - saying goodbye to 18 years of service and the income they desperately needed to stay afloat, not to mention her very affordable health-care benefits. Now their monthly drug co-pays are just as much as their car payment - if not more - and my sister's replacement job only pays 2/3 what her old job did. Gas has gone up 50% in two years... and people are wondering why we in middle America are in trouble?

I'm tired of a war that should never have started, taking lives and draining resources from a country that so desperately needs to be building infrastructure of our own, not blowing up others'. I'm sick to death of the daily butcher's bill; of personal liberties and rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights being trampled in the name of "national security." Such a damn waste...

I'm tired of the majority of Republicans chanting about the "defense of marriage" against those scheming homosexuals and their "agenda" - when the people who are helping to destroy marriage are the straight white Christians who can't stay married, not the gays who would choose to be married if they could. And I'm even more tired of everyone pointing at that one issue as the primary reason for the "downfall of America" - when in fact the fault is laying at the feet of almost every single person who is pointing the finger...

One person, I think, is closer to the truth than others.

Thomas Friedman's editorial in the online New York Times on May 4th addresses an awful lot of the hows, and whys, of our current political and economic mess. He captures much of what I've been feeling for years - and just so the NYT doesn't archive this piece of wisdom, I include the text of it here, with all due credit to Friedman and the Times.

Who Will Tell the People?
By Thomas L. Friedman
published May 4th in the online New York Times

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to sub-prime values: "You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years."

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: "You go to war with the army you have." Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post-docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore ... have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

Thinking about financial meltdowns...

I see the Wall Street meltdown from a couple different perspectives...

I was a newbie public accounting auditor, doing mortgage audits of places like First Federal Savings & Loan, Home Federal Savings & Loan, First Federal of Delta and a whole bunch of other S&Ls in northwest Ohio that overstretched themselves and collapsed in the early 80's.

As a newbie, I got assigned to the fun stuff - checking mortgage documentation. We were looking at internal controls that said "Is there a certified signed property valuation for the loan?" when the question should have been "Is there a property valuation that was worth more than a fart in a windstorm?" The loans were 100% documented from a compliance standpoint - but the worth of the documentation itself was nil, plus or minus 10%. This sounds very familiar to where we are now. Just substitute the words "market valuation" and you're set.

Another view...my sister and brother-in-law are owners of a condo purchased with a low-ball-rate ARM. It's not an extravagant thing - you could buy 3 of these with some of the monster properties surrounding us out here in the genteel country south and west of Toledo. It's nice, but there are no granite countertops, no sixty-thousand dollar kitchens or Hummers in the garage. It's just a nice home for a person who can't climb stairs and another who (after 30 years of cutting grass) is tired of dealing with a yard.

They were approved at the upper bleeding maximum edge of their ability to pay - with an adjustable rate mortgage that was (unknown to them, or me, at the time) almost certain to go up way beyond their ability to pay when the adjustment period came due. The people who wrote that loan put the shells in the chambers, cocked the gun, and pointed it at my family's head, knowing that the gun would almost certainly go off in 3 years. If my sister and bro-in-law are culpable, those who originated the loan and those who refinanced it are equally culpable. Just because they wanted this house was no reason to sell it to them, or finance it for them. Just because you can say "yes" doesn't mean that you should...

Of course, no one could have foreseen my sister's disability or Jeff's down-grade from year-round worker to seasonal status. But even at their most financially productive, with the other debt they were carrying, it was madness to approve the loan they got. And I'm a little resentful that the organization wants the bailout, rather than the little people who were sold an exploding pig in a poke.

I know what the S&L buyout cost the nation 20 years ago - and there is no way in hell it's not going to cost exponentially more this time than last. And this from an economy that's already suckin' dry from our overseas adventures.

To my mind, the only reason the oil companies haven't been stampeded together and broken-up like in the last antitrust wars is because we are so addicted to fuel. The nation - myself included - is so addicted to the "right" to independent and at-will travel that no one will risk threatening the supply of our drug - even though people (just like addicts) are now having to make decision between their fuel (read: drug-of-choice) and food, health-care, even housing.

I just wish I had an answer. But I also know the old answers won't do anymore, either...

Forgive me, br'er Cobb, for cross-posting this from your comments onto my own blog - but your post brought up several ideas that have also been percolating in my mind.

The lies about home sales and poverty

A couple things in the local papers - articles which have been echoed nationally - have really angered me lately, and it's time I get this off my chest.

The first anger-inducing headlines were about how home prices have dropped for the fourth straight quarter. You can read about it in this Money.cnn.com article, with the caption "Mortgage Meltdown 2007."

The part that all these articles don't mention is the thing that has been happening for much more than a year - and that's the long-standing freeze in the mid-priced housing market. Up until recently, if you wanted to buy or sell a half-million-dollar or better house, it was no big deal - because people in that economic strata hadn't been hit with the economic two-by-four that many of us now face.

But I knew a year ago, visiting my sister's neighborhood on the southwest suburbs of Toledo, that the housing market was already showing signs of rigor mortis, because in a neighborhood of 50 or 60 condos in the $150-200K range, there were 12 of 'em for sale. A quarter of the housing stock in this reasonably-new (less than 10 years old) development was on the market - with almost no movement whatsoever.

My sister and her husband had already lost nearly $40,000 in equity two years ago, trying to get out of the two-story house which they could no longer live in because of Sue's advancing MS and fibromyalgia. They'd been clobbered by the soft housing market two years ago.

I truly do understand that what the market is measuring is the price of homes that actually sold - and that average is down considerably for four quarters straight. But no one is measuring the devastating effect of the homes that won't sell - like my friend John's house in Lexington, sitting empty on the market for a full year. If you factor in the homes whose sale price is zero - those that haven't (and likely won't) sell, then the market is in a much, much scarier place.

When you look at the group of people being affected by this, they are what used to be called the lower-middle class - working stiffs whose home was their single biggest asset, and their single biggest investment. These are also the people whose employers (where they are still employed!) are also squeezing them on health care. Sue went from reasonably good employer-paid HMO health care with reasonable cost sharing to a 70%/30% plan with a vastly reduced prescription formulary and much higher co-pays. This happened even as she went from more than $15 an hour to barely $10. Less money, more costs, and no cushion in sight.

The tragic part about this is that it wasn't front-page news until the melt-down in the sub-prime market affected Mr. and Mrs. Lexus-and-BMW's ability to sell their half-million-dollar house to move up to the $750k one with the granite countertops. Once they couldn't get what they wanted, boy, it was Oh, the humanity!..." everywhere.

Honey, we have been there. For a while.

For ten years or more, economists have been warning about the housing boom and the home-equity mortgage market that has been propping up consumer spending. Without those two things fueling the economic engine (and with it stock prices), there would have been a considerable retraction before that - and the White House couldn't have afforded that, now could they? Well, folks, the vultures are coming home to roost - folks like us have been watching the flies circling these particular corpses for quite a while.

The Toledo Blade's recent report says that 22% of Toledoans - more than one in five - are living below the poverty line. Detroit (a scant 40 miles away) has the unenviable position of having the highest percentage in the nation for big cities of people under that ugly line.

And there are a whole bunch of people like my sister and brother-in-law who are hovering just above that dreaded line. People who may become the last generation in their family to have the "American dream" of home ownership. Like an iceberg, I'm afraid that the true size of the problem has been hidden up to now, and I don't know what we can do to recover from it.

And yet our President can still justify what is upwards of $400 billion in costs for the Iraq war - not to mention the human costs of 4,031 lives in the coalition forces, more than 27,000 wounded and crippled US soldiers, and more than 70,000 civilian casualties (possibly much higher).

John McCutcheon's lyrics come to mind:

The ones who call the shots
Won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle
We're the same.
("Christmas In The Trenches")

We need a different set of answers, people.