The American Dream, and Stuff...

The New York Times story on the Bush Administration's stoking of the mortgage bonfire demonstrates a couple of interesting points about home ownership in the United States. The first is the fact that there is no "market" when it comes to housing, if you are deregulating and advocating policies that convince more people to borrow beyond their means when it comes to a mortgage. While it is a complete hypocrisy within conservative thought, to believe in a market but toy with the conditions that regulate it, it is not limited to them. The lack of a broad range of ideas regarding property ownership, which excludes everything from Libertarian to Marxist thought, suggests that the only viable parties buy in on this notion of encouraging home ownership at the expense of reasonable consideration of debt.

The other major flaw in this thinking is that it is also a policy that leads us in pursuit of more "stuff." Jerry Seinfeld, when he was first a stand-up comedian used to do a bit on how we got our "stuff," and how often we did not know what our "stuff" was, or how we got our "stuff." The mortgage bonfire, as the NYT calls it is the ultimate example of a focus on consumerism and materialism. The Bush administrations policy, in complicity with both political parties, focused on living out the American Dream through the things we have rather than the relationships we cultivate with friends and family. Instead of making home ownership a possible outcome of the American Dream, it was made a goal of it, and like Seinfeld, we wake up with a stuff hangover that then leads us to ask, as the president is quoted as saying, "How did we get here?"

It is refreshing to see many families focusing on spending time together, doing things with one another, rather than accumulating more stuff. It would be great to see more people considering their spending more consciously, all the way up to and including home ownership. The American Dream should be about the quality of our relationships in our communities and the world, not merely focused on the material world.