Suck it up and drive on

Straight from my stream of consciousness:

The Central Valley region of California was converted to agriculture decades ago with the aid of irrigation. This water supply is allocated by the government and is necessary to grow crops in land that would otherwise not receive enough water to grow anything. Farmers established farms and orchards in this area based on the assurance that water would always be supplied to them, and supplied for less than the cost of providing it. Now California is a few years into a drought with water supplies at their lowest in a long time and the government decided to turn off the supply. Hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland will lie fallow this year due to lack of water. These farms will not being hiring workers, documented or otherwise, resulting in loss of jobs not only for them but also in the towns where these workers once shopped, lived, and used services. Some small towns may cease to exist.

The government did not make this decision out of malice or caprice. Agriculture is a big part of California's economy and the jobs and tax revenue it generates is important to the state. There just isn't enough water to sustain this artificial agriculture. Perhaps the wisdom of turning all that arid land into farmland seems questionable now; nothing was done to make the area self-supporting. Protecting the environment wasn't something people gave much thought to then, nor did anybody predict how huge the population would become. Now the music has stopped and the farmers of Central California are left without a chair. The shortsighted planners who created this fiasco are dead and gone, while we are left to pay the price for their lack of foresight and poor plan to create an unsustainable way of life.

What does this mean for me? It means I should not be surprised if the price of produce continues to go up. I will also probably appreciate my home grown produce more this year. It also makes me feel a lot better about my situation. I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself lately. I have been feeling bad because things could be better and aren't, when really things could be much worse and aren't.

I have been angry lately at the forces which seem to have conspired against me in the housing market. I bought into the American Dream of home ownership. I wanted to buy a home in the city where I grew up and where all my family still lives, even though it is now one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. I knew when I bought that prices were likely to go down and I was ready to weather a bit of a drop. The prediction was that prices would drop but recover in a few years; not too bad, right? Boy was I a deluded fool!

My lack of understanding led me to be surprised by the way the housing fiasco has reverberated throughout the entire economy of not just this country, but much of the world as well. In hindsight it makes complete sense, but then hindsight generally does, doesn't it? The value of my home has dropped by 25% and the decrease has only been accelerating the last few months. Where will it hit bottom?

Now there are plans for a "rescue" but based on what I have heard so far I do not qualify. My mortgage is too far underwater and too big to qualify for the programs that have been announced so far. I won't even receive the "Making Work Pay" tax break because my income is too high, an income that in this area only makes me part of the low to mid middle class. This has all been a bitter, bitter pill to swallow. Like the California farmers, the music stopped and I have no chair.

After feeling really bad for about a week, I am finally starting to come to my senses. Yes, it really sucks that I am in this situation. No amount of anger or recrimination can change it. Ultimately I am responsible for my own decisions and I have to find a way to live with them. My payments are ridiculous huge but at least I can make them. At least I have a solid job. In some ways all this rescue stuff from the government is only making things worse because now people identify themselves as needing rescue. A person who needs rescue is a victim and the word that goes with victim is helpless. I do not want to be a victim, I do not want to be passive and sit here waiting for help. My situation is not bad enough for that. If one of these rescue plans enable me to get a lower interest rate, that would be awesome and I will gladly take the savings and apply it to my loan principal. If not then I will keep doing what I am doing, plugging away at paying down the principal on my mortgage. Someday the value of my home will stop dropping and start going up again. Then someday, as my value goes up and my balance goes down, the two numbers will meet in the middle briefly before heading in opposite directions.

A saying I learned from my time in the military is very useful to me now. It embodies a philosophy of dealing with adversity. I am going to try hard to live by it: "Suck it up and drive on". Because no matter what obstacles to success I encounter, if I don't keep going I will never reach my goal. I have to pick myself up and keep going, driving on.