I dreamed a dream

I dreamed a dream in times gone by
When hope was high and life worth living..

Dreams lie below one's subconscious, guiding our desires, crafting our motivation. Did I know it? When did someone else's dream become mine own? When did I, the critic, the cynic, the optimist, become a believer? This American Dream. With its promise of home ownership as civic duty and self. When did a home have to be a house?

Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung no wine untasted

Yes, the euphoria that preceded the fall, the mythic illusion sold to us. Starter homes were for trading up. Soothed by the emotional hook, the lie, the "natural" cost of living in the Golden State. Naive.

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame

We gambled. Double down on black in a game where we knew only what we knew. "The only rule you may be told is this one." We didn't know the rules. Nor the flawed rules behind the rules. Nor the avarice behind the rulers of the rules.

Securitized and resecuritized to secure profit.

And so we pay the price. Our dream teetered on the unsustainable fact that house prices should be sky high, in the red, not by red line, but by greed line, to line the pockets of the usurious. To hope for breaking even means hoping that housing becomes unaffordable again. Who would hope for such a heartless thing?

I had a dream my life would be
So diff'rent from this hell I'm living
So diff'rent now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed

--lyrics by Andrew Lloyd Weber

In losing our security, we found... freedom.