Parade of Shames

I could hardly believe my eyes and ears as I witnessed the evening news cover a limosine full of prospective home buyers being paraded from foreclosed home to foreclosed home in South Florida by realtors hired by the lenders to unload the seized properties. The video was festive and the mood bubbly. Here were bargain basement prices for many homes of much greater value than the asking price, and the sellers and buyers alike were drooling. One clip showed a small group of them toasting the occasion with champagne.

It made me ill. The apparent attitude was as if someone in a monopoly game had landed on a high-improvement property of theirs and they now got to seize all the opponent's properties, cash, and other assets and put him out of the game. How could people be so crass! Don't they realize they are dealing with people's former homes? With their lives? With what remains as all they had to live in? With what, but for the hasty greed and avarice of unscrupulous lenders, they would have been able to still be in until this horrible recession passes?

Millions, we're talking about, Millions of families have lost their homes across the nation to foreclosure, even as they have lost their jobs, in many cases permanently, and the government just drags its feet trying to do something to slow the process and get the banks and finance companies to work something out so people can stay in their homes. What's the rush? Those houses are not going anywhere. What's the rush to ruin lives? It's not like they will make more money by seizing and selling them for pennies on the dollar, for gosh sake.

And as for the parade of shames (not the parade of homes), if those champagne-tippling philistines have the money to bargain-shop for houses they don't even need for themselves but undoubtedly want to flip just for a fast fat profit, why don't they use it instead to try to help those foreclosed people stay in their homes and ride out these tough times? They're the ones who need help. And for that matter, the banks who created the crisis with their sub-prime loans, the government who refused to regulate it, the rich oil companies who have exascerbated the poverty of those poor families with their obscene gas prices, big corporations, the churches, synagogues, mosques, charities, and anyone else who can afford to offer assistance should do so as well. This is an unprecendented human crisis, not a time for bargain shopping. There aren't many things that are worse for a family than to lose its home. It's bad enough when it happens from natural disasters or accidental causes, but to look out your window and see a limo of greedy vultures drive by sipping champagne and eyeing your house is enough to push one over the edge.

At the very least, lose the champagne and lose the limo. If you can live with the idea that you have a home that was basically stolen at the misfortune of another, then at least have the decency to buy it quietly and discretely.