"Every time I look at him, I just see horns growing out of his head. I can’t help it; he makes me nervous," says the nice woman who loaned me a CD of Native American wooden flute last week. Her tastes in music proved excellent, and she’s also a student of medicinal herbs.
She wears her hair long and despite working rotating night shifts cutting open envelopes and putting them on a scanner production line, she often bothers to wear pretty Indian shirts and silver jewelry that the stifled pagan inside of me craves (I am an Apollonian; DISCIPLINE and RESTRAINT are supposed to be my hallmarks. Plain navy blue dresses with a single chain. And gold, of course, not silver.)
"Oh, don’t be silly," I chide her.
"But the people say the End Times are coming. And the Bible does say that the Antichrist will seem to be a man of peace, a great leader that everyone will want to follow. I just see the horns ..."
Normally, I encourage people to accept their psychic senses, but this is ridiculous. "It’s just cultural," I assure her. "Goes back to the first time a European saw a black man. We spent two thousand years dividing the world into Light and Darkness, White and Black, and the Light was Good and the Black was Evil. So when we saw Black Men, it was a natural assumption ... a logical mistake. We thought they were demons. But really, they’re not. They’re just human, and look at those ears – they’re painfully British. Obama’s not even REALLY black."
"You have to think about the End Times, though," she insists. I make an excuse and walk away. I can’t handle absolute apocalyptic nutcases gently; I can twist their minds into pretzels for amusement or send them screaming in terror with quotations from New Testament Greek, but I can’t keep them as friends. Heresy, stupidity, and profound belief in the delusional fabrications of con artists are just too much to tolerate in one package. I wander over to the tables closer to the shop door and sit down to munch my carefully-rationed carbs. The story on CNN has switched; now they’re discussing the impending bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Day old news, and the first I’ve heard of it.
"Damn," I say to no one in particular. "THAT means the housing market is dead for another six months."
"Huh?" asks Michelle, stopping enroute to the door. I point to the screen.
"The only thing holding up the mortgage market just collapsed," I point out. "As well as another bank. That means I’ll never sell the bloody house. I’m stuck here for another year at least."
"If the bank dies, does that mean you don’t owe them anymore? Like if they’re garnishing your wages, maybe they won’t collect?" she asks brightly.
I snort. "No, someone ALWAYS collects," I tell her. I knew she had some money trouble following her divorce; I wasn’t sure exactly what. "But the paperwork will be royally screwed up for months."
"So, like if they’re taking your money ..."
"They might forget when you’ve paid it all," I explain. "You have to be ready to tell them. Firmly. And back it up with papers."
"You have to do that anyway," she says. "My father warned me about that. They’re taking $60 a paycheck, and I only have $250 left to pay , which is only about a month ..."
"Well," I suggest, "you should go ahead and get all the paperwork ready and lined up. Because chances are that whoever’s handling it a month from now won’t have ANY idea what they’re doing or who you are."
Michelle nods thoughtfully. "So now the banks are collapsing," she says. "Which maybe, they wouldn’t be doing, if they’d been willing to work with people on what they COULD pay, instead of what the contract said. I saw this guy on TV, he had taken one of those loans where the payment went up in three years. And he figured that when that happened, he’d re-finance --"
I nod. "Which was a smart way to handle your money, five years ago. Because after you had that record of paying on time for two years, you could do it."
"But now he can’t. And the payment went up to $4400 a month, and he couldn’t pay it. But they wouldn’t negotiate until he got behind. He called the bank, and said he wanted to negotiate so that he WOULDN’T get behind, but they wouldn’t talk to him until it was too late and he couldn’t keep up. And then when he couldn’t keep up, they foreclosed. But the house wasn’t worth what they loaned on it, so he lost the house, and they lost lots of money, and there’s a vacant house doing nobody any good."
"Yup," I agree. What else can you say? "And the banks are collapsing because they made idiotic deals and can’t or won’t work the problems out. And people are getting kicked out of their houses."
"Makes me glad I’m just renting right now," she says. "But pay goes DOWN – you have, like where I worked before, we got paid based on the average local wage – so one day we were working for $17/hour, and we were called in, and told that the average wages in our area had gone down, so now we were only going to make $13/hour. And lots of people are losing jobs at THAT price ..." (as a sidenote, we are both being paid significantly less than $13/hour at this job). "But what I don’t get," she adds, "is that where I live – not more than a couple of blocks from my apartments – there are houses going up that are selling for half a million dollars. Where is all the money? Who’s got the money to buy houses at that price?"
"Obviously not you and me," I answer. No time to segue into politics; break is over. But I have hopes for Michelle. Despite her youth and innocence, she seems to have a grip on basic economic reality.
Unfortunately, economic reality also has a grip on her. In the six months since we started this job in the same training class, she's lost a husband and a house and gained twenty pounds in stress-fat. That's life in the underclass -- short, fat, and miserable, with little or no prospect of escape. Is it better or worse, to know it? Or to believe in a mythical End Of Days when good Christians and small babies will be wafted up to Heaven to watch the Last Battle from ringside seats on high? Or alternatively, to believe in a mortal Restorator who will magically sweep clean the messes of three Republican administrations and make democracy healthy again?
Oh well. I no longer believe in Saviours, but the toilet in the getaway cabin is leaking onto the floorboards and the apple tree appears to have finally bitten the dust. It would be nice if we could salvage the economy at least halfway, or perhaps make it possible to travel overseas without being shot for being American. Aristotle said that politics is the art of the possible ... perhaps we do today, what is possible today, and then get a fresh start tomorrow on new possibilities.