Who's Fault is This?

 Whose fucking fault is this?

We are in a great financial crisis and the future is not certain. Cries of lack of individual responsibly echo through the night, as if crucify all the liars who took out loans they couldn’t pay  to telephone poles would protect  us against any further excess.

Who to blame, and how much of this is caused by personal irresponsibility?

I used to listen to talk radio back in the day before I could afford a tape player. I was always amazed by people who called up with an argument and got eviscerated by the host. I thought to myself, ‘how hard is it to have a single point, express it quickly, and then get off?’

What I didn’t see at the time is – talk show hosts are predators. They have trained and been educated in talking. They hone their skill with words over time. They have practiced in front of millions of listeners until the fear has left them. They also have self selected themselves to be where they are – good tones, confident postures and faces that on Radio would love, (think: ugly fat guys getting even with words for all the bruises popular guys gave them in high school.)

It’s not a fair fight – callers are thrown to the gladiators in the ring of a telephone for blood sport and the amusement of others.

People want to believe, they want Christmas, and they want to win the lottery. Many have grown up all their lives thinking that owning their own home is to have arrived. They fall into the ‘home or purpose’ reason for existence group.

And it’s not as if people from Nigeria were telling them they could afford a home.

Given a choice of something now, or something latter – and given a credit culture paid for by advertising and flash – individual responsibility for actions becomes a weakness that gets exploited, in the same way a teenager gets taken advantage of by a sophisticated predator.

The people showing the houses, offering the loans, processing the paperwork, repackaging the loans so no longer identifiable, selling the packages and leveraging them 30:1, regulating the farce, taking the bribes, and pocketing the billions – all of them had more understanding of their actions, and more blood on their hands, than any person who thought with dreams in their eyes that Christmas had come for them, and come early, at last.