Nov 7, 2008 Posted by john on Nov 7, 2008 in Easy Listening | Comments Off

My America, Part II: The Nightmare

This is the second part to a two-part post entitled My America. Originally, it was meant as an exploration of my emotions following the Election Night victory of Barack Obama. Unfortunately, events on November 6th conspired to dampen that happiness. The first part is called My America, Part I: The Dream.

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I woke up on November 5th¹ still crying. I was crying because, just like Michelle Obama, I was proud of my country in a way that I haven’t been before. My country made a resounding choice to elect a president who’s concept of what America could, and should, be is drastically different than the concept our previous administration chose to believe. My country made a resounding choice to elect a president who would focus on helping the majority of citizens rather than a few large companies. My country made a resounding choice to elect a president that would look to the rest of the world’s countries for friendship and cooperation, rather than look to them with disdain and contempt.

For the first time, my country chose to elect this president regardless of the color of his skin.

And for the first time, my country chose to elect this president regardless of the color of his skin. This fact resonated in me in ways that I did not expect and could not imagine.

I remember being in high school and seeing footage of crowds of people in the street sobbing after President Kennedy was shot. I thought this was a horrible event, a negative defining moment in American History. Even so, I couldn’t understand crying about it. In the 1980s, with Reagan as president, I couldn’t believe that we had a society that would actually connect emotionally with a president. When Bill Clinton played saxophone at the Democratic National Convention during his campaign, I was assured of that. He was fun, he was charismatic- but he wouldn’t make anyone actually cry. Kennedy was an earlier time, and people were more, well, simple then. They were more naïve. No one would cry for something like a president today.

I was wrong. The footage on the television was nothing to the feeling in my heart. I cried. I wept. I crumpled to the floor and sobbed. And the next day I woke up still crying. It was like a dream- a fantastical possibility that you know can’t be true yet enjoy enough to hope you don’t wake from it. I woke on November 5th as if still in that dream.

But, as so often happens in dreams, the world shifted under my feet. Where I was before surrounded by friends and hope, I suddenly found myself swimming in fear and despair. On November 5th, my wife Jessica was laid off.

A layoff is one of those things that is completely different when it happens to you. It’s like cancer, or a death in the family- you think that you can empathize and that you can understand what someone must be going through. You think you can, and it’s very positive and thoughtful to try, but you can’t really do it.

Because the reality of being laid off is far too terrifying to wrap your head around unless you absolutely have to. There are too many thoughts and emotions to deal with for you to actually accomplish it unless forced.

When I found out, it was 4:15 on the day after the Election, and I was still writing Part I of this post without even considering there might be part two. I was writing with tears in my eyes- tears of happiness. Within seconds I felt like I was swimming in fear. My first thought was that I hope she’s alright and that I’m going to have to find some way to comfort her.

My second thought was: “Shit. We have two months before we loose our house.”

Jess and I bought our house just a bit over a year ago. While we don’t technically have a sub-prime mortgage, we’re pretty damn close. Our house is a one level ranch built in 1966 on the west side of Hood River. We got a normal loan, even though we couldn’t afford a 20% down payment, because I’m a disabled veteran. I have a lot of problems with the US Veteran’s Administration, but one thing that they’ve done well is make a system that allows us to buy a home. With the VA loan program, we got a normal loan, with an excellent interest rate, with no down payment, and no requirement for mortgage insurance. The VA Home Loan program allowed Jess and I to live The American Dream.

The VA Home Loan program allowed Jess and I to live The American Dream.

Because that’s what the dream is, right? Own your home, have stability, build equity. There’s this whole American Dream that, as unconventional as we are, we bought into. And we were happy. We had enough savings to dump some of it into a down payment, and we had enough left over to make some improvements- a new patio, raised beds, painting, some electrical work. Equity.

Meanwhile, the economy spiraled. But that too is like having cancer, right? It’s all meaningful, but we had a couple thousand in the bank and could still afford to eat out once in a while so it wasn’t really meaningful. It’s bad and all, but Jessie and I have 3 masters degrees between us. We have a monthly amount going into both long-term and short-term savings accounts. It’s bad, but it was affecting people that were not, well, us.

Not to say that we weren’t affected. My entire retirement account was lost in the downturn, but it was only $1200, so it wasn’t something we were yet counting on. We have student loans, we have a car payment, we had to stop paying more than the monthly amount on these because food was getting difficult to buy. But my attitude to all this was: “Come on, man. I grew up in the damn projects. We are not having a hard time because we give up drinking good wine.” We both had stable jobs, we have advanced degrees, we have savings enough to tide us over for a couple months already, and that savings was growing.

But America is a harsh mistress. You see, it all seemed fine because it was working out. Our house was actually one of the cheapest we could find in Hood River, yet it was still over $250,000- making the mortgage basically equal to Jessie’s paycheck. It was risky, but the VA helped us make the decision that- since the housing market was only going to go up- at least it would plateau- we’d better get on that treadmill. It’s moving too fast all ready, but this is our home, our community, and we want to be here for a while. If we don’t buy a house now, we might not ever be able to. We can’t afford it, we thought, but in a year we’ll be better off and it’ll get easier after that. We can buckle down for a year.

It’s so much easier to call someone else stupid after the fact than it is to see your own stupidity during it.

Yeah, I know- and you’re right. Every time I saw foreclosure news I thought “Well, stupid, that’s what you get.” Unfortunately, it’s so much easier to call someone else stupid after the fact than it is to see your own stupidity during it. Even now, the jury’s out on whether we were stupid- or at least how stupid we were. We weren’t stupid for getting ourselves into a tight, if sustainable situation. We were stupid to believe in the stability necessary for that situation to be sustainable.

This is what you realize when you hear that the layoff is you, or your spouse, rather than someone on the news. You feel scared and you feel stupid. We’d used some of the savings in our account to improve the house- leaving us with only two months of savings left. Two months we wouldn’t need because we had stable employment.

But two months is not a very long time when you live in a small community, and there are only so many places you can go to work at your level, in your field. Two months is a blink. Two months isn’t even enough time to sell a house anymore- they sit on the market.

“Oh my god. We have to sell our house. What will we do? Will we have to move? Where will we go?”

The fear that descends is palpable. The view of all your mistakes is crystal. The fact that you’re house, your entire financial situation, is actually constructed out of cards- that fact is unmistakable. We have no health care, and the COBRA coverage is $950/month. We couldn’t afford that at the best of times. Winter’s coming and we might not have enough to pay for heat. We live in a house of cards. Our financial situation is tenuous, at best. Indeed, our entire American Economy seams to be nothing more than a well constructed and tremendously unstable house of cards.

Welcome to The American Nightmare.

Part of me wants to blame Cheney and Bush. Part of me wants to blame the Republicans in general. Part of me wants to blame the Fed. But I can only blame myself.

Debt is the dream. We don’t have a lot of credit card debt, but going from the projects to masters degrees took student loans, and going from renting to “owning” took a mortgage. We have debt. And we have an economy that’s based on debt. We have a system that promotes debt.

Part of me wants to blame Cheney and Bush² . Part of me wants to blame the Republicans in general. Part of me wants to blame the Fed. But I can only blame myself. I can only blame the fact that I’m too blind to see another way. Could we build our own house without a mortgage? Strawbales? No- we can’t afford land in our community. We bought into The American Dream because we could see no other way.

And we’re still not really that bad off. After that terrifying first night, we took stock of our situation and found that we have more like 4 months of savings. We realized that Jessie get’s unemployment benefits. We realized that Jess has skills that many people will pay for.  We might start a company, or at least make Engage The Gorge something that pays some bills. We have options. We have time and space enough to realize that we, more than many, just might be able to wake from this nightmare.

My main worry now, is that so many other people will not.

That is my hope for Obama’s presidency. That is the feeling that I’m holding onto now. Not that we have a president that is just like me, but that we have a president that is just like us.

My hope is that we finally have a president that will bring us back to America: The Dream.

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<< Go back to My America, Part I: The Dream

1. I originally had this as November 6th, but Jessie reminded me that I really need an editor [↩]
2. I always put Cheney first because, well, let’s face it [↩]

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