It's hard when you are nineteen or twenty-year old radical to understand how older lefties "settle down" and get pulled into the system. You swear that will never happen to you. But the system has many ways of wrapping around you, like the vines that suffocated Sleeping Beauty's castle.
One of these ways is home-ownership. An absolute radical would never pay rent. They would find an abandoned building and fix it up and make it home. When the supposed "owners" come to kick you out you would wage a battle of wills and ideas. You would point out that as you are actually using and improving the land, it is truly yours, regardless of whatever piece of paper they carry that grants them the right to leave it abandoned. You would refuse to pay rent to any person because as soon as we agree that the land under your feet belongs to someone else you become a slave.
But at some point you have to pick your battles. Most folks by the age of 25 decide that they have goals beyond lengthy arrest-records for squatting. It seems difficult to imagine balancing living in a squat with pursuing your noble dreams of becoming a writer/artist/feminist lawyer/eco-terrorist. No matter how radical, most of us don't end up living as squatters.
This leaves two options: rent or buy.
Renting
is odious. It is ludicrous to pay a third to half our income to some
person just to have a place to lay our weary heads. And what does this
landlord do for us? They hire someone to mow the lawn, if they are
decent they hire someone to fix the stove when it breaks. And
otherwise, we never see them. We can at best feel sorry for those people forced to piss
and sleep in the alley because they have not paid, as we have, to have
access to a toilet or a shower. When a homeless woman lays down her
head to sleep she is a thief because every square inch of land in the
city is "owned" by a person or a state and she has not paid for her
right to sleep there. If every doorway and underpass is someone's
property, it would seem that those who don't pay have no right to exist
at all. Rent is like paying a capitalist tax to let us be part of the system. No other species of animal in the
universe can understand why humans would allow themselves to be
beholden to other humans for shelter. But we endure it.
For
this reason, I would like very much to own my own home. Of course,
property has become so expensive that one cannot just outright buy it.
You must make an agreement with a bank that they will buy the house for
you and you will pay them off for damn near eternity. This is equally absurd. Why
should one of the fundamental requirements of life be so expensive that
it takes a lifetime to pay for it? If this is ethical, why not a
lifetime of debt for every piece of fruit we eat? Why not charge us
for the air we breathe? We like to think we would never allow such a
miscarriage of justice. Yet somehow we have come to agree that having a
place to stack our books and make our bed should involve a lifetime of sacrifice.
But this arrangement with the bank is preferable to renting because at some far-off point you can hypothetically own your own home, which means living in peace without the burden of rent collection hanging at your back til the day you die. Many aging radicals eventually come to this same conclusion. To achieve this coveted relationship with the bank, one must prove themselves a fine and worthy borrower through the concept of "Good Credit."
It is insufficient to merely pay your bills. To
establish Good Credit, you must have several charge cards. I did not
have a charge card until I was 26 because they so terrify me. Most
radicals don't want any part of a system that makes its money off of
indentured servitude of the young and naive. However, in pursuit of
Good Credit, I recently received my second credit card in the mail. It
came with a blank check that encouraged me to "Make a purchase I've
been putting off," or to "remodel one of the rooms of your home."
Because if I can't afford that new sewing machine and granite counters
in the kitchen today, surely next month I will be able to afford it
plus 15% compound interest! Of course I can't. But everyone knows
that the companies make all there money from debt, those who pay are
leechers on the credit system (and how strange is it that a business
model is set up that holds in highest regard those that lead it to no
profit at all and denigrates the group that provides their billions in
wealth?).
I have decided I need a second charge card because when my sweetie
recently went to apply for a home loan, the bank told him he didn't
have enough credit. He has very good credit---he uses a credit card
and has never been late on any bill or payment of any kind, yet this is
not enough. So it seems that to buy a home one must have a stamp of
approval from not just Visa or Mastercard, but both.
Pehaps the person who told me this was incorrect. Perhaps the government is efficient enough to ignore a debt of three dollars. To some extent, it doesn't matter. As long as this argument is widespread, it will influence many people. There are many people who hate the war and hate the idea that they are paying the government to continue the war. But there are few people who would be willing to withhold that money if it means they may never be able to buy a home. So Uncle Sam becomes a troll at the bridge, demanding tribute so that citizens can cross the bridge into the middle-class world they were promised as part of the American Dream. We pay not because we agree but because we must, to get this other thing.
So where does that leave us? Paying our taxes, worrying about the opinion of Visa and Mastercard, buying stocks and bonds in the hope that they will produce enough money that we will somehow, some day, be able to afford something that should go without saying is part of life---shelter. May the youth forgive us.
