Juxtapositions

Saturday, while waiting for an oil change and sundry service on my car, I was subjected to Fox "News." in the waiting area. I could probably write a whole entry on that channel, but that's for another day.

At the same time, I was reading God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It — an excellent book, and well worth its own entry. Another time.

What caught me was, first, a seeming contradiction within the first, and second, a connection between the two. In some commentary-posing-as-news, Ben Stein was raging on about how, over the last 60 years, stocks have consistently outperformed real estate, and he expects they will continue to do so. Five minutes later, the bottom-of-the-screen scroll proclaimed that "Ben Stein says everyone should buy 3 houses right now!!" About that time, I read a passage in the book about biblical archaeology:

When they dug down into the ruins of ancient Israel, they find periods of time when the houses were more or less the same size, and the artifacts show a relative equality between the people, with no great disparities. Ironically, during those periods, the prophets were silent. There was no Micah, Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah because there was nothing to say. But then they dig down into other periods, like the eighth century, and find remains of huge houses and small shacks, along with other evidence of great gaps between the rich and poor. And it was during those periods that the voice of the prophets rose up, to thunder the judgement and justice of God.

When I see houses sitting empty, mere investment purchases waiting for a seemingly inevitable upturn in value, when there are people who sleep on the street; when I see the rapid-fire buy-and-sell that has driven the price of even merely adequate shelters out of reach of the average person; when I see affordable housing turned into exorbitantly-priced condominiums... well, it all makes me very, very sad... and worried along the lines of "how much worse can it get?"