It's not my fault.
I know you've been hearing a lot of that lately. From the presidents of banks and the CEOs of investment houses, for starters.
But when the financial cognoscenti aren't blaming them for this economic mess, they are blaming people like me, and I am starting to feel defensive.
I don't begin to understand what has happened to capitalism, but it looks like it is pretty much finished as an economic model, and everybody says it is the fault of people like me.
They say people like me have been bingeing on credit for years, and now everybody is paying the price for my greedy impatience to live the good life, even though I couldn't afford it.
I don't feel like I am living the good life. I feel like I have just been doing what I'm told.
It seems like yesterday that bankers were telling me to take the equity out of my house and use it to pay for my car because it was "cheap money." I swear this is true. I mean, I never would have thought that up myself.
So that's what I did.
They also told me to take money out of my house and use it to improve my house - add a deck, replace the siding, fix up the kitchen - because my house was my biggest investment, and I needed to improve it.
So that's what I did.
They told me to open a 401(k) and invest the maximum, even though it made it tough to pay the bills. "Pay yourself first," they said. And that's what I did, until it hurt.
We drove our cars - the ones the house paid for - for 10 years because we believed them when they told us the cheapest car you will ever drive is the one you are driving now. Then they blamed us for declining auto sales and the dangerous ripple effect that had on the economy.
When we finally broke down and bought new cars, we bought General Motors cars, instead of gas-sipping foreign cars, because they told us that what is good for General Motors is good for the country.
Those General Motors cars aren't very fuel-efficient, so our dependence on foreign oil is my fault, too.
Oh yeah. Then General Motors closed the plant where my husband's two brothers worked, leaving them without jobs. I think that is probably my fault, too. I'm just not sure how.
All these years we have taken family vacations because that kind of thing is really important to me.
Now those family vacations are an example of a lavish lifestyle that has been this country's undoing. It was Bethany, not Tuscany, I tell myself. But I still feel bad about those family vacations.
