Reality Bites.

This has been a weird week. It's been raining so long I barely remember what the sun looks like. We've had both the heat and the air conditioner turned on, at different times in the last 7 days. And though I look at my calendar and wonder how the hell I'm going to get my kids to all their scheduled activities, because of the rain almost everything this week has been canceled, and we've had dinner sitting at the table in the kitchen together as a family, twice.

Like I said, weird. But nice.

Last Friday I spent the morning hitting the garage sales in the rich people neighborhoods nearby where we live, ending the morning sitting on a patio drinking margaritas for lunch.  That's about as good as it gets for me - rummaging through other people's cast-offs, while chatting with a close friend, and then eating on a patio in the sunshine with a drink.  It was a good day.  Although I did notice lots of For Sale signs in those neighborhoods, some of which were probably in foreclosure.

Later that evening, I drove down to a ministry seminar at St. Paul's School of Theology.  If you don't know, that place is in The Hood.  It's like this oasis of green grass and colonial brick that looks like a college campus sprouted up in the middle of the barrio, except it's been there longer than the surrounding neighborhood has been a barrio. Go figure.

As I drove toward the campus, after instinctively locking my doors and then feeling guilty about that, I started noticing that many of the little disheveled homes along the street had tons of stuff out on the curb and in the front yard: dressers, chairs, sofas, bed frames and mattresses, overstuffed boxes and trashbags.  At first I though, Huh, they must be having bulk trash pickup tomorrow morning.  After a little while I started looking at the houses themselves as I drove, instead of just the curb, and realized that many of the doors were taped, and signs posted.

It wasn't bulk item pickup day. It was evictions. House after house after tiny little broken down house, people's stuff thrown out in the yard - dressers and blankets and teddy bears - to be picked through by the vagrants. And another family seeking shelter on a pretty Friday night.

On the surface, there is a big difference between a rich family who loses their house to foreclosure, and a poor family who gets evicted and their stuff thrown out on the street like it's trash.  The rich people, perhaps because they have a higher level of education that money brings and access to lawyers and friends and family with means, have a better chance of moving out in a civilized manner, finding another place to live and putting their possessions in storage.  But it doesn't hurt any less, emotionally, to have to live through that.

We can sit here and say people made bad decisions - those rich people  never should have gotten so greedy and narcissistic and leveraged themselves into that marginal loan and built that gigantic castle on the sand in the first place. We can say that if those poor people had not been spending $7.50 a day on a pack of cigarettes, or maybe way more than that on an ounce of heroine, and had just kept getting one shitty job after another, that they could have paid their rent or their own little mortgage and made it work.

We can sit here and say it's their fault, certainly not ours.  But try and remember that the next time you go to use your credit card to buy something because you didn't have the cash in your wallet. We are all to blame for this economic catastrophe. Every single one of us. And I, for one, already have enough chinks in my own glass house. I'm done throwing rocks.