Bearing Witness To The Tragedy That Is Debt Collection And Foreclosure From The Perspective Of Ordinary People

When oh when will we stop looking at foreclosures and debt and debt collection in some kind of clinical, dispassionate, scientific or unemotional way?  These are not numbers, or percentages, or stock price declines.  When it is called a "crises" it is so because we are to understand, not that it is problem for banks and insurance companies, but because we should not be neutral, inert, or relaxed about it.  Because we need to be subjective, and passionate and sensitive, understanding the pain and agony and confusion and upheaval actual people and families are going through.

If we understand this, if we understand the trauma and suffering real people are fighting to avoid in filing bankruptcy, if we can just come to somehow appreciate and acknowledge how disparaging such a world is that it must be avoided, then we would better understand the emotional damage that is done when creditors and others willfully violate the automatic stay and discharge injunctions issued in bankruptcy cases.

An HuffPo article recently brought some of this to light when it wrote about the heart-breaking wreckage that junk removers find when vacating foreclosed homes.

In the article they talk about finding the report cards of elementary school children still stuck to the refrigerators, the parents obviously proud of the As and Bs obtain.  The elderly that are locked in because they cannot escape, what seems to many of us, the insignificant level of debt.  The unemployed that cannot seem to get any traction in extracting themselves from the hell they find themselves.

It is all so real.  It has to be understood in a non-academic and personal way.  It needs to be internalized.

Comments

[Patches]

I know all about internalizing it. It is supper tough telling someone say on a fixed income that the home they have been living in for the past 45 years or so is going to be lost no matter what. The mistake? Re-Fi or Home Eq. with a variable rate or "Option" ARM. uuuhhhgggg! It's hard enough telling younger debtors much less those who are supposed to be enjoying the twilight years. Makes all the more satisfying when we get to do Violation of Stay or Discharge against a Mortgage Servicer even though we don't get to go after the person in the "Trailer" home that got the debtors to sign in the first place.