They blew it

Twelve months after retiring from a 40-year career designing sophisticated computing systems, Robert Wright wonders if he'll have to find a job.

Wright and his wife Beverlee have lost 48.57 percent of their retirement fund. They had planned to travel to Norway once they retired since Beverlee is 100 percent Norwegian. They thought they might visit Scotland, too, where Robert traces his roots.

But the Sioux Falls couple has had to put those plans on hold – perhaps permanently.

"There's every possibility I may have to consider going back to work," says the 68-year-old Wright. "Having lost that kind of money, you don't know how you are going to be able to carry yourself through retirement."

It might be the silliest thing I've ever heard. In newspaper columns like this one and on TV and out in the blogosphere, some are suggesting if Americans had lived within their means, the nation wouldn't be in the economic predicament it is in now.

That's rubbish.

The flaming meteor that is the U.S. economy is the sole work of Wall Street and Washington. We are where we are today because of their greed and incompetence, because when home mortgages were being handed out like penny candy at a parade and home prices were spinning like a tote board in a telethon and everyone even remotely connected to the housing industry was wallpapering their kitchens in cash, no one in Washington or on Wall Street bothered to demand an answer to one simple question:

What if the bubble bursts? What then?

What Doug Mashek cannot fathom is how the people whose job it is to spot economic peril could miss something this big. "They act like it blindsided them," says the Sioux Falls producer of radio programming and commercials. "I can't imagine how they didn't see it coming."

It is true. No guns were held to the heads of the borrowers who took out all those subprime mortgages. They were free to say no.

But if you had never owned a home and someone told you that you could own one and that someone happened to be from a bank willing to give you the money, and if everyone around you was purchasing a home and smart-looking people everywhere were trumpeting the virtues of investing in real estate and whenever that person from the bank stopped by, he made it seem as if only an idiot would refuse to take the money he was waving under your nose, wouldn't you at least give it a second thought?

Yet somehow we – you and I – are to blame for this 1,900,000-car pileup that is the U.S. economy?

That number, by the way, is how many jobs have been lost since this recession began a year ago; 533,000 jobs were lost in November alone.

Some of those who've lost their jobs live here. Diana Brown has a sense of what they are feeling.

Today, Brown works in sales for a Sioux Falls insurance company. In October 2001, however, she was laid off at Gateway after working at the computer manufacturer for five years.

Once out of a job, Brown says, "it doesn't take very long before you start to panic." When days are spent sending résumés and receiving no responses, she says, "pretty soon you start to feel pretty alone."

You can pin plenty of stuff on Americans and have it stick. We expect too much. We give too little.

We are unaware or – worse – uninterested in the rest of the world. When we should be celebrating courage, we worship celebrity, and when we should be condemning wrong, we too often look the other way.

But no way do we deserve to take the fall on this.

In the final stages of his computing systems career, Robert Wright designed systems to allow for the analysis and the accounting of telephone calls made over the Internet. In the time since he retired, however, the technology in that field has continued to race forward.

If given the chance, he suspects he could catch up. But Wright is a realist. He knows people approaching their 70th birthday are not exactly in high demand in that line of work or – for that matter – in any other. "Absolutely, unconditionally, irrevocably, they should have known," Wright says of the people who could have – and should have – prevented this train wreck. But didn't.

If the time ever comes when we decide to ask those people why they blew it, I know just where to find them.

In the meantime, to even insinuate that we – you, me and decent and hardworking people like Robert Wright and Doug Mashek and Diana Brown – aided and abetted in this abomination is preposterous.

To lose your job is frightening. To lose it because someone failed to do theirs must be infuriating as well.