Myopia

I've worn glasses for distant objects now since 1994 -- fifteen years. It sure seems as if I've been wearing them my entire life. My pre-1994 memory has faded away, I no longer remember a life without glasses, or without a CPAP for sleep apena, or without an insulin pump tethered to me 24 hours a day, or without a night guard to stop nighttime grinding. I go to sleep with tubes, hoses, wires, and a plastic tooth guard. I'm only thirty nine. At this rate, by the time I'm sixty nine I'll have three more degenerative diseases and three more tubes, hoses, or wires keeping me alive at night, so I don't wake up dead.

But you know what? This is now. And now is all that counts. In modern America now is all that has ever counted. Those future diseases, that will be then, and now always wins.

The same applies to Obama's mortgage package, soon to arrive on our doorsteps. The ultimate in myopic vision, the costs of this massive subsidization of residential and commercial mortgages will become apparent during his late administration or with his successors'...but fuck the future. Now is all that's important. Homeowners currently underwater, not homeowners seven years from now, are in despair. A judge in Stockton who, trained in law, will now decide how much someone ought to have paid for a housal unit, not based on credit risk or other valuations. The whim of a few bankruptcy judges will decide how much to cram down, and by proxy, how much taxpayer bailed out banks are forced to write off.

No matter if future homeowners are subjected to insane credit costs, no matter. It's pretty blurry out three years hence.