My friend upstairs is unfazed at the amount of money's he's lost in the collapse. There were many, many zeros involved, to hear him tell it.
"You have to laugh," he says. "We're all going to the same place."
My friend is still well off financially, but he's also acquainted with poverty. A first-generation American of immigrant parents, he lived for two years in the back of a used Camaro while attending UCLA. The third year, he squatted in a gym locker room.
Wealth cycles are as natural as seasons. Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter this year begins thus: "Our decrease in net worth during 2008 was $11.5 billion."
Buffett's life is unlikely to change, however, because he doesn't live extravagantly.
The truly rich do not identify with wealth. The truly savvy do not identify with poverty.
Both are external conditions having nothing to do with one's humanity.
This goes against every premise of the Kool-Aid dispensed by Madison Avenue, though it's not forced down anyone's throat. Neither Wall Street nor Madison Avenue held a gun to anyone, saying, "put these Manolo Blahniks on your Visa!" "Trade in your perfectly good car!" "Charge this vacation because you deserve it!" "Buy derivatives."
Our collective credit hangover is no one's fault but our own.
True, the very bank executives now whining like a toddler for a binky funded this material engorgement with derivatives based those doing the engorging. Whoopsie.
Now, as Mr. Buffett points out, people who did not overspend will take care of people who did. Those modified mortgage refis won't come out of the ether. They'll come out of the higher interest rates paid by people managing debt responsibly. It's no different than the healthy underwriting the unhealthy through inflated insurance premiums, or childless people paying for the education system.
The situation may seem inherently unfair, but why complain? I would rather be healthy than ill. I believe literacy to be a critical investment. I would rather be liked for my rapier wit than for my shoes.
I've got to live somewhere, and here remains one of the most civilized if slightly dysfunctional places on the planet. I'm reminded of something I read about how a certain group of individuals who came to be in this country.
One man was beaten, threatened and hung upside down from a tree above the bones and rotting corpses of his neighbors in Sudan. A woman from Rwanda survived the genocide by hiding in a tiny bathroom for three months. Another man was 20 when he escaped Khmer Rouge three times before walking through the killing fields to Thailand.
Today in America, the bills are due. No more European excursions charged against the value of homes. The dream car may have to remain phantasmagorical, and we could have to work a little longer and make due with a little less.
If that's as bad as it gets, it's still very good. Very good indeed. The more we understand that, my neighbor says, the better it gets.
And then he laughs.
Deborah D. McAdams
Senior Editor
dmcadams@nbmedia.com
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