http://ny.metro.us/metro/blog/my_view/entry/The_suicide_solution/13150.html

We each – I am – we all bear personal responsibility for our thoughts and actions. This doesn’t always mean that we get happy endings results from our having been put in charge of it; there’s no amount of pretending that will make that so. Crappy things regularly happen in the best of circumstances; it cascades downhill with some speed in the worse.

I, the consumer, HAVE to educate myself on the purchases I make. That’s easier and quicker to do with my toaster oven but it is just as true that I must do likewise in boning up on the biggies. Like houses.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Big Corporations and Other Generally Capitalized Systems. But blaming “them out there” for some woes we may have been silently complicit in bringing upon ourselves by our own negligence cannot, IMO, be justified.

Are we now learning more about systemic housing and gov’t finance problems that went on for far too long? YES. Does it suck that people are losing their homes? YES.

Did too many people buy way way way too much home for what they actually, honestly, truly afford at the very moment they signed the contract? Did they factor in the contractual fine print figures when they calculated their overly optimistic finances?

It sucks, it really sucks. To me it’s like if two of the three little pigs would have spent a few minutes realistic planning their abodes before they constructed em, they might not have had to run willy-nilly to #3 to save their asses.