Thursday, October 23, 2008

What is normal?

She sells real estate on the coast of North Carolina. When asked how things were selling now in the midst of the "credit crisis," she said that things were back to normal. Things were now back to the way they were when she started the business. Things were back to the times when the customer had to have some money to put down. Things were back to where they had to run credit checks and the buyer had to have good credit to get a loan. Things were back, she said, to the way the business used to be.

She made me realize how much of a fantasy world we have been living in. The dream of everybody getting rich in real estate, the dream of Social Security investments in the market that would just keep getting larger and larger, the dream that all of our problems would be solved by capitalism were just that dreams and illusions. I am not happy losing a third of my value in my investments. But as one who has made a life of trying to live by the stories in the Bible, I must confess that I am not surprised by the greed that has consumed us. The man who was working out with me in the Y said he used to believe that his broker at least had an interest in seeing that his clients made money as well as himself. Now he is not sure. Speculators, hedge funds, investment rating firms, CEO's with amazing salaries, million dollar bonsuses, all suggest that greed was working overtime. But the sin of greed was in all of us. The Christian story is such that we are never surprised by the presence of evil in all of us.

The other thing that the real estate salesperson's remarks did for me was to make me terribly thankful for the things I do have, for the life I have had, for the fact that what I have is paid for, for the fact that the normal life was always good enough. Even now in the midst of the world wide economic challenges when we look around at the world around us, it takes a lot of gall to complain. We have so many blessings that we take for granted that we do not even acknowledge. We just keep forgetting what "normal" is.

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