Purge

I should be typing away on a Lab Report right now. But while I was staring at my inbox on NC State's student webmail, I noticed that I was given a 'purge' option. This kick started my idling brain into a full fledged swarm of thoughts onto who choose the word purge and what they were thinking at the time. To me purge has such a strange connotation. Is it supposed to be freeing to empty my 'trash', like an enormous weight off my back. Its not that I have an emotional connection to the items I am purging, the vast majority of emails that go to my trash are junk (quite literally trash). But the idea of purging them makes it seem like some sort of washing of the hands. Its so dramatic. PURGE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PURGE? To me the term empty is far more refined, I like the idea of walking my unwanted emails to the internet's dumpster and politely sending them off to the landfill of the internet. To me this in stark contrast to the idea of purging.

But then again, maybe this has something to do with the nature of most NC State students. Could it be that such a conservative student body has found a way to weasel religion into everything. As if somehow purging emails is some sort of spiritual reminder to cleanse your own soul. This would seem to be reaching on my part (yes, you are reaching). But seriously, who decided on the use of the word purge.

I know this seems like a fairly trivial item when we are surrounded by bank collapses, wars on terrorism, rising inflation and decreasing home values. But in the end (and this is a theory I'll steal from Vibrations), every single event, every harmony, isn't one single sinusoid but rather is composed of many seperate sinusoids. Applying this theory to life; then isn't every issue, every problem, just a summation of all the little problems. I don't mean to trivialize the trying times we live in. But I would argue that this current economic crisis isn't a problem of the burecrats in Washington. This is a problem caused by the summation of the mistakes of every day Joes. Overextension of credit is not the banks fault, yes their greed was the catalyst. But in reality, this was all caused because everyday people bit off way more than they can chew.

Most in the circles that have read a lot on the crisis probably see as I see that this problem wasn't caused by Freddie Mae, Fannie Mac and George Bush. This shit hole we are in was caused by Bill Clinton and Henry Cisneros (see the front cover of the NY Times on October 20th). The last administration told lending agencies to make home ownership available to more people. They asked lenders to loan out these sub prime loans and then gave Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac (FDR's brain children) mandates to insure these horrible loans or face increasing competition and constriction. At the time, they looked like heros. 70 percent of Americans had homes of their own, in historic terms this was absolutely ridiculous. A few people saw this coming, but amongst such money making as was seen in the last 90s till around 2001, who was really going to change the system. Now we see the problem, all people are not created equal. Not everyone in this country can be a home owner. You can't have a low income job, no education and expect a home. Thats not an American promise, its an American illusion.

Now we as a collective will have to pay for those mistakes. And yes this has nothing to do with the wording of the trash can on an email server. But I guess the point I'm making, is that its in the little things. Those little actions which seem not to matter, really do have more of an impact than you'd think.