Same ol trick

Fish bait, mouse traps and fly traps. They have one thing in common, which us that they lure unsuspecting victims to their demise. Word on the street is that people are smarter than creatures (which is true), but everywhere we look, and even throughout history, we see how deception has overcome so many over and over again. The Trojan Horse comes to mind because it is the classic example of how seemingly intelligent people are beguiled by means which seem obvious in retrospect. Looking at the mortgage crisis today, i say we've been deceived using the same formula the Greeks used on the Trojans.

In the Trojan Horse story, the Greeks offered the large wooden horse as a token of surrender to the Trojans, who accepted it without proper inspection, and even brought the horse into their city walls. Likewise, the mortgage lenders lured us with sub-prime loans as a token of our chance at the American dream, and we gladly accepted them without looking closely at the terms, to see whether we could actually afford the payments. Just like the Trojans, we got taken advantage of. Now we do not carry majority of the blame, since we naturally trusted that the government would not permit the banks to screw us over, and since we assumed that the banks would not risk that much money if they didn't really belive we could pay. Now the foreclosure rates have soared to their highest in our history, now double the rate they were at the same time last year. I guess we all learned our lesson now, and we will definitely be very cautious about throwing our trust at the large institutions, no longer naively assuming that they always have our best interest at heart. This has been a very humbling experience for us all, and it just shows us that the system is not as well-wired as we thought it was. Since the old illusion of safety is gone, I dare say we will see a revolution in our spending and consuming habits. We will henceforth learn to live within our means, spending only what we can presently afford.

There are already several families that have begun to eat less as food prices go up, and we already began to drive less a while ago in response to the gas hike. I hope this translates to an all around humility, because now that we and the rest of the world clearly see that we are not as steadfast as we claimed to be, we need to come to our senses and quit falling for the traps of the illusions of grandness. It is impossible for a whole nation of people to live like kings. The mortgage crisis came from this very assumption that we can all own our own castles and we've seen that its impossible. We must refrain from digging ourselves into debt in order to live 'The American Dream'. The true American Dream is justice and equality, giving everyone the chance to pursue their own gold, but the distorted version is that gold is handed out to everyone. As long as we have this justice, we should be content, whether we live in a house or an apartment; watch a CRT or a flat screen; or drive a Toyota or a Lexus. As long as we are comfortable, it should be good enough, and we should no longer be lured into financial distress by trying to acquire more.

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