I Don't Want to Be Collateral Damage

And I don't want you to be either

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

In June 2009, one year into the Great Recession and the housing market crash, we learned my husband’s company was moving operations from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne within the next year.

Over the next 12 months, we watched houses in our lower-middle class neighborhood fall into disrepair and then go up on the market, their foreclosed value significantly less than what we knew we would need to sell our house for. I already didn’t want to move. The prospect of putting our house on the market when the houses around us weren’t selling raised my anxiety.

On one end of the move, we benefitted from the misfortune of others. We found a mess of a house that had been deserted for nearly two years. We took advantage of the foreclosure and fought to win the final bid for the house so we would have a place to live once my husband transitioned into his new role and I started my work as a graduate student.

But on the other end of the move, our house sat empty. We were making two house payments we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I chose to miss a payment, which would impact our credit for the next several years. In an effort to save our immediate finances, our realtor finally found us a renter and we became reluctant landlords.

We would have our “summer house” in Indianapolis for eight years after our move. Through financial struggles as our family grew, career changes, and a move to Texas, we still collected a monthly check that barely covered our mortgage. We were afraid to raise the rent and lose our tenants. When repairs came up, whatever little money was left often didn’t cover the emergencies. We finally convinced our realtor to persuade our last tenant to apply for a home loan and buy the house from us, arguing that she would be spending less money on a mortgage at the now lower interest rates than what she was paying in rent. We walked away with a couple thousand dollars to pay off other debt and the relief that the house was no longer our problem.

And during those eight years, we watched as the banks responsible for our housing woes and those of millions of other Americans, got bailed out by the government and continued to practice business as usual, doing everything possible to benefit those at the top while the rest of us dug ourselves out of the holes they put us into. The banks and their shareholders saw a few thousand people as simple collateral damage for their predatory loan schemes. But the collateral damage of those few thousand actually ended up impacting our entire economy. Millions of people lost their homes. People lost their jobs. The American Dream became unobtainable for many Millennials who were just entering adulthood as the market crashed. It’s hard to argue that it is acceptable collateral damage when nearly every person in the country either knows someone who is impacted or is directly impacted themselves, even if, like us, they didn’t lose their homes in the end.

And now we’re facing another situation where people at the top are arguing that we should just readily accept the collateral damage from slashing and burning nearly every part of our federal government. They tell us government cuts are going to hurt, but they will only hurt for a little while. The closing of agencies will hurt some people, but they’ll eventually find another way to make their lives work. Clinical trials and vaccine production will restart eventually, but we can accept a few people getting sick if our medical system will be improved, eventually.

But will all of this really make us better? Will it all really strengthen our country? Will we really come out on the other side, look back, and say, “Well, that wasn’t so bad”?

While I truly believe we will eventually get to the other side, I don’t believe we are going to be saying, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.”

Instead, we are going to be picking up the shattered pieces, asking why we allowed so many people to be collateral damage for the political games of the few.

I understand the distrust of the federal government, I really do. It is big and cumbersome. In the last year, we were finally seeing recovery from government shutdowns and the impacts of a global pandemic. Education, health, businesses, and everything in-between became collateral damage in government efforts to stop the spread of a virus that now appears to be permanently with us, the long term effects of getting the illness still largely unknown. And no one in government, regardless of political party or position, is particularly eager to admit where they went wrong and work to rebuild public trust.

But completely giving up on the American Experiment doesn’t seem like a particularly good way to correct past wrongs. In a liberal democracy in a pluralistic society, it is impossible to make everyone happy all of the time. It is impossible to meet everyone’s needs all the time. It is impossible to take everyone’s feelings into consideration.

When our founders wrote the Constitution, they wrote, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect union…” because they understood that perfection was not available to us, but the consistent goal of seeking a “more perfect Union” was.

We’re human. Collateral damage will always result from making hard decisions and trying to determine what is the best of a series of difficult and complex choices. But our goal should always be the least amount of damage to the smallest number of people.

That isn’t what is happening right now.

Y’all, I’m not willing to be collateral damage in someone else’s Hunger Games. But I don’t want anyone else to be collateral damage, either.

Believe me, there are a lot of reasons I want to respond with FAFO right now. There are a lot of people in my life who are just now starting to realize the consequences of years of political decisions; there is a potential for a lot of FAFO.

But that immediate response to those who are hurting allows us to ignore our role as citizens. Far too many people have allowed the rich and powerful to convince them that their most valued right as an American is the right to individualism.

Hurricanes don’t care whether or not you’re a climate change denier. A drought doesn’t care what kind of farming methods you support. Rapists don’t care if you are pro-life or pro-choice. Cancer doesn’t care if you are for or against Universal Health Care. Terrorists don’t care which side in which conflict you support. A school shooter doesn’t care if you are for or against gun control. The “bad” things that impact all of us do not stop to ask whether or not we deserve it. They are just going to impact everyone in their path.

The Declaration of Independence doesn’t say we have an inalienable right to focus on our individual needs and wants. It says we have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those three inalienable rights cannot be achieved through individual action. Those rights can only be fully achieved in an economically, emotionally, and physically healthy community.

We are a big country with big problems with deep systemic roots. We are also a big country that has done big things. Those big things have caused discomfort. Those big changes have required sacrifice. Some of our biggest and most important changes (such as the ending of slavery) have caused significant pain. But each time we have gotten to the other side of those changes stronger and better as a nation.

Any reasonable person understands that change is not pain free, but that also doesn’t mean we intentionally seek to cause pain. It doesn’t mean we pursue change at any cost. And it doesn’t mean we do it without a plan for what we the people want our country to look like in the end.

Instead, we look at the short-term sacrifices for long-term improvement. We seek the flourishing of all of our citizens, understanding that this human flourishing makes us stronger, not weaker. Human beings and everything we depend on for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are not collateral damage. We should be demanding better of our elected officials and ourselves.

Because if we’re willing to accept unmitigated collateral damage as the cost of our individual success, we will lose our souls, and our country, in the process.

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