the cautious life.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year not particularly caring about the mortgage crisis. It’s tough because I watch a lot of CNN. And CNN spends a lot of timetelling me I that should be very worried about subprime mortgages.

I rent. I don’t carry a balance on my credit card, and I don’t spend all of my weekly paycheck. I have a savings account, a 401(k). I am The Anti-Credit Crunch. I almost feel un-American.

But a couple of weeks ago, I started reading “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan. Now, at about page 134, it starts to make sense. Egan tells the stories of 1930s farmers who endured the Dust Bowl — a group of Americans, mostly poor and many of them immigrants — herded to the southern plains with big promises that largely turned out to be hollow and, in many cases, just lies. They built lives around credit and the promise of ever-higher wheat prices that, instead, plummeted. And in the process they destroyed the land they hoped would make them rich — or at least comfortable. Instead it drove them off and killed.

And if you think of subdivisions as modern day wheat fields (granted, not exactly apples to apples), you can start to see the parallels. Legions of Americans took loans they couldn’t afford, at terms that didn’t really make sense from shady lenders, all in order to get their slice — a raised ranch or colonial in a decent school system.  It all makes sense if the home values continue to rise.

With falling home prices comes the humiliation of foreclosure and the ridicule from those who say these people — these non-saving, overspenders — foolishly overextended themselves. Or maybe worse the apathy from people like me, who fail to see how it’s relevant to our lives.

But it occurs to me that I can’t simultaneously empathize with the 20th-century farmers whose miserable lives Egan chronicles and ignore the forces that are today driving people from their homes. And you’ve got to think that as long as there are people who are optimistic enough to think things can get better, that land or property can improve their futures (this is a sort of quintessential American optimism) – and people willing to take advantage of that optimism – it’s a storyline we’ll see again.