Here in Portland, there is a group of protesters rallying the city to turn on water and other utilities on a foreclosed home so that the squatter (the former owner) can stay there comfortably. This woman has already been evicted several times by the bank and the police, but she and all of her "posse" believe that it is her home and she deserves to stay there. She claims that she got into a "bad" loan and that the banks and the government should not have kicked her out just because she fell behind. I know that many of my liberal neighbors would feel pity on this woman for being kicked out of her home by the "big bad banks", but I have a different opinion.
Unfortunately most people in my generation grew up with the misguided belief that if something goes wrong in their life, it must be someone else's fault. It's hard to find someone these days that is able to take personal responsibility when they are facing a hard time, instead of finding an excuse that is out of their control. Of course there are things that do happen on life that are out of your control, but those things are great ways to learn something and change your behaviors. But if you aren't using enough common sense to make good decisions, and something bad happens, you can't blame anybody but yourself. This woman entered into a mortgage on her own, it may not have been a good rate or may have had a lot of costly stipulations, but she signed it and agreed to make the payments. She knew very well that if she fell behind, they would take her house. That is how a mortgage works. If the economy went south, and she lost her job, that is not the fault of the bank. Bad stuff happens. If she didn't have a savings plan or was able to find another job, the consequences have to fall on her. Nobody is promised a free ride in this world, when bad stuff happens, you take care of it yourself. Too many people live for the moment and never stop to think about what might happen on a "rainy day." It really is unfortunate that she did not have a "rainy day" plan, but the right thing for her to do is walk away and learn a valuable lesson for next time. Make sure you are entering into contracts you can keep, have a plan during the sunny days to save for the rainy days, and if things turn bad, handle them appropriately. I have gone through my fair share of rainy days, but I have always worked my butt off to get through them and learned valuable lessons for what I can do differently next time.
No matter what happens, there is ALWAYS something that can be either done to fix the situation, ways to prevent the situation, or at least a lesson to be learned from it. The government, big banks, corporate America, and CEOs are not responsible for you, they are there to run their businesses and they have worked VERY hard to be where they are. There are not any successful and wealthy people out there who got where they are because they sat on the curb and complained about life being unfair. They got there by working hard, facing a lot of obstacles, and taking responsibility for them and working even harder.
Instead of seeing more coverage of this woman and her plight to have someone else right her wrong, lets see more coverage of people who are struggling to get by but are keeping their head up and being responsible to the people who rely on them and keeping the promises they made. Lets also start thinking about some new lessons we can learn from this bad economy, and how people can change their habits so that a "rainy day" doesn't turn into a storm!
