A Reason We Are Slouching Away From Greatness
Last night I read Joe Klein’s summation article on his 24-day road trip across America in order to better understand the election. I have not been able to locate the entire article online, even though it was only published in Time October 18th.
The whole article was very well done, but it was a few sentences that made me pause. At the end of this post I print his lines. It strikes at something I have talked about in various ways over time on CP, and also when discussing current events with friends.
From 2008….
In her later years when my mom would hear of younger people building new homes, and not being able to move in until every room was finished she would just shake her head. She was flabbergasted when anyone would continue to pay rent instead of moving into a partially built house, and not make do until it was completed. “Young people have to have everything right now,” was her common statement. I can hear her speak about her own experiences, “We had to work and wait for the things we wanted.” The underlying argument my Mom was making was that too many young people were taking on too much debt. They did not know how to wait for things. She felt that if you had the home you wanted while in your 20′s what would you have to look forward too, and strive for in the future. Granted, there is a lot of the WW II generation thinking there, but also there is a lot of truth to her words and feelings.
I guess it was about a year ago when a young man on “60 Minutes” proudly spoke in front of the camera that even though he could afford his mortgage he was going to walk away from it as the value of the house had fallen. I was stunned. He made a lasting impression on me. A negative one, but lasting.
It was with that as a backdrop that the words from Joe Klein struck me.
More than a few people had begun to question their own values and those of their neighbors. Was it O.K. to walk away from a mortgage? (according to a recent PEW survey, about a third of Americans think so.) But would our parents ever walked away from a mortgage? Never. And what did that say about our moral standards? Was it part of the reason the country seemed to be slouching away from greatness?
I’m with you on that. Our twenty-plus years here in the little shack on the swamp proves that. We’ve made it a place we love to live and plan to stay maybe forever. Our improvements are in no way related to improving the selling price which probably makes us stupid. The new barn roof wasn’t cheap but it saved a century old barn.
But this idea of walking away from a mortgage isn’t tied to that love of place. When the Texans lost their jobs in the eighties, they put their keys in the mailbox with regret. They weren’t necessarily of the conviction that a house is just an investment. I think there’s a lot of that going on today. If you gotta go, well… you gotta.
I just have a real difference here on this topic.
In our nation’s recent past instead of thinking of a home as a place for treasured memories to be made and stored houses have become a mere stepping stone to a larger house. The home became a mere house, nothing more than an investment. A warm place reduced to a cold financial transaction.
That, to me, is sad.
I grew up with parents who became home owners after World War II. The home they bought was not new, in fact, it was old and needed lots of work. Over the years many projects were completed, including one that allowed for my brother and me to have a new bedroom off on the side of the house. I have often joked that my parents were even smart enough to time our births so there was never a question my brother and I would have to share that room. He moved out on his own just as I was needing to upgrade my living space.
For all the years I grew up in the family home there was never, not once, any word spoken about what that improvement, or that addition, would do for the value of the house. The value of any improvement was the day-to-day pleasures and conveniences it made for the family. Nothing more, nothing less.
Joe Klein is of course wrong. In Texas during the Reagan crunch people put their keys in the mailbox and walked away from their mortgage obligations. I did a quick Google to refresh my memory and this what popped up. Not a real convincing piece of evidence, but enough to confirm my remembrance of media accounts of the same kind of moral dilemma facing people then. If you obligate yourself to a bank and the economy collapses, do you remain in indentured servitude to that business, or do you renounce the debt?