J.O. – Amen. No one is gossiping about victims of Hurricane Katrina, are they? This world needs a big fat lesson on compassion for your fellow man (or woman ) :thanks:

Crazy Lady – :heartbeat: :heartbeat: I am so so sorry that you had to go through either of those things.

But I have to tell you how much I appreciate and respect your opinion here. You have so eloquently put into words what I could not and I hope that people reading this appreciate it as much as I do.

I can say that as far as the aftermath goes, loosing a house to fire was actually easier than foreclosure. And neither one are easy. Let me say, I was fortunate to not have lost the entire house, only about half. Because my photos were kept in Rubbermaid bins – I still have those precious memories. But with a fire, the help came out of the woodwork at us.

When we lost our house, we became one of “those people”, as if we were deadbeats who are a drain on society. We got all sorts us unsolicited “help” (and by help – I do mean JUDGEMENT) from well meaning friends. “What if you do this, have you tried that, surely there must be something you can do.” Plenty of people were willing to judge us for not being able to financially carry a mortgage that went up $600 in 5 months time. I would like to add – we were assured by our lender when we were signing papers that something like exactly happened to us, would never happen. Our mortgage “may go up a little, but it was just as likely to go down.”

They didn’t see me at the grocery store trying to feed a family of 5 for two weeks on less than $100. They didn’t see my husband and I stay up half the night trying to figure our how we are going to manage to cover bill, or even be able to pay the lousy $5 a month for our son to attend Boy Scouts. They didn’t hear the fights over money, or see the times that we didn’t eat dinner, just so we could be sure the kids did.

When you loose a house to a fire everyone has sympathy for you. It is still very hard to deal with the aftermath, but you don’t carry the social stigma that you do when you loose a house to foreclosure.

I do want this to diminish anyone else’s pain that they are going thru. Because I have learned that you can’t compare your pain to anyone else’s pain. A disaster is a disaster, no matter what or how it was caused.

This post was not about comparing natural disasters to man-made disasters. I think that’s pretty clear here.

But, let’s take a moment to look at something, when natural disasters happen, families tend to come together and bond. People reach out and support one another, communities come together. And, it’s a blessing that comes out of something tragic.

On the flipside – foreclosures, drive families apart, cause divorces, and there is a stigma attached no matter why it happened, society looks at you as a “deadbeat” someone who does not honor their debts or as someone who was clearly so greedy to “have it all” that they were too stupid to read their contract or pay attention to the type of financing they were getting. There are rarely, if any blessings that come from that. Worse yet, communities do not come together to help, in fact, people start to back away from you rapidly.

Thank you for enlightening me though. You made me a bit smarter today (which isn’t hard to do, y’know!)