By WDAGarner | Posted September 22, 2011 | Siesta Key, Florida
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The Great American Nightmare
The American Dream is dead and America is flat broke. That’s not to say you can’t still go out for a cold one after work each night, or rent a DVD and veg for hours in your overstuffed lounger in front of that 42-inch Samsung. Or get that wonderful foot massage and pedicure on Saturday morning. Even deep in the economic blood-red of the United States of America, there’s always room for a six pack, a movie and a foot rub..
Way things are now, you can’t possibly pay down all your bills in your lifetime, even though you probably worked out a plan to do so within ten years, but that was 12 years ago when things weren’t so bad and you had a fulltime job with bennies and a small savings account, the IRA and the 401K and all that stuff you probably never thought you’d ever need.
Too high and climbing, your mortgage is overwhelming. The insurance on your home keeps creeping up year after year for no apparent reason, or at least any sane reason the bank can give you, and you can’t very well cancel it because the bank that holds your mortgage won’t let you and they keep threatening you with immediate foreclosure if you as much as think about it.
With this new so-called healthcare reform now in place, your medical bills are skyrocketing, especially since your spouse went into the hospital with intestinal problems, and neither of you can afford health insurance because that would cost you both more than $2,000 a month in premiums, and neither of you takes home more than $1,500 after taxes every 30 days.
You have enough debt to saddle a medieval horse, and that horse’s back is swaying more and more with time. Any day now, it’ll surrender to gravity like a droopy chin, and the once majestic beast will drown in a sea of debt that screams over you like a tsunami that traveled 10,000 miles from the dark, cold Antarctic, gathering more and more momentum with each passing mile.
Is there any recovery from such a force of nature?
The good news is that once you come out from under that bankruptcy, all those material things you accumulated over your lifetime—the beautiful home and the car and truck, and your worldly possessions—will be in someone else’s hands, starting with your bank, which has no use for your stuff anyway except for what it might fetch at auction.
No more dusting off the little Hummel pieces from grandma. No more cleaning the fine silver you got on your wedding day from all your friends who chipped in money they didn’t have. No more vacuuming and cleaning your lovely home you built from scratch and promised to pay down before the end of that 30-year, 6% loan.
You’ll be left with little more than a few articles of clothing, if even those. Life is no longer what you thought it would be. The American Dream has fast become The American Nightmare, brought on by an invisible force some call dark matter, the stuff of science fiction that tells us we can’t see it or smell it or touch it, but it’s effects are there and they’re real so you best believe it.
And in the wake of all this, you’re left scratching your head, wondering what the hell just happened here?
Does anyone have an accurate answer? Does anyone outside your life even care? Your friends have all but abandoned you, because they’re in the same position, facing bankruptcy or having just been spat out by the court system that took everything they once owned. Daily phone calls that once beamed happiness and baseball and Oprah now scream and cry tales of IRS liens, foreclosures and that fourth job, the one that starts at two in the morning when the baby’s crying.
Your family can’t help you, either, because they just got hit with a huge tax bill that they’ll never be able to pay, but hey, wait, there’s always that monthly payment system with the IRS, and they only charge 30% interest on top of what they say you already owe them.
So, no, even family can’t help you. Seems everyone you know is being pulled under by this rip tide of dark matter whose invisible and unyielding gravity takes no prisoners, but it’s all too happy to take you down down down into that forever abyss.
The American Nightmare used to be the stuff of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. Now it’s front-page headlines even in mainstream media. No one can escape it. The United States is going down that same road of hyperinflation and depression that effectively sacked the Weimar Republic in Germany, in 1923.[6] [7] [8]
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