Category: Uncategorized

The 2008 housing crash was by definition an unexpected event. Banks held worthless investments in subprime mortgages that cost many individuals their careers, financial stability, and homes.  People would sign mortgages without reading the fine print, which sometimes resulted in them facing expulsion all while Wall Street profited. Once the house market came crashing, people were hit with this unannounced news that their mortgage rates would increase to extraordinary levels and if they could not pay the increase then they would be evicted. In the big short it states “As most of these loans were structured, however, the homeowner would pay a fixed teaser rate of, say, 8 percent for the first two years, and then, at the start of the third year, the interest rate would skyrocket to, say, 12 percent, and thereafter it would float at permanently high levels.”  This sudden increase caused many families to lose homes, and paid home mortgages that were not in their budget. When investors looked to make more profits the lenders had to loosen their normal requirements on the types of people who can get a mortgage. This gave the ability for lenders to give out mortgages to individuals with lower than average credit and to those with unknown sources of income.  The “Big Short” provides great representation on the type of actions and situations that were occurring before and during the 2008 financial crisis.  Companies would manipulate and deceive people, by “ taking  the stream of payments the homeowner would make to Household over fifteen years, hypothetically over thirty years, and asking: if you were making the same dollar payments over thirty years that you are in fact making over fifteen.” (pg. 31, Lewis, M. The Big Short).  This is a clear representation of fraud as this is clear deception for monetary gain. By construing the facts and manipulating data, people were tricked into agreements and contracts that they were not fully aware of. 

In the “Parable of the Sower”,  we are given this picture that Lauren and her family live in this dystopian society. Throughout the story we are told how bad her neighborhood is, for example Lauren stated “ I walked down the middle of the street looking and listening and trying to avoid potholes and chunks of broken asphalt. There was little other trash. Anything that would burn, people would use as fuel. Anything that could be reused or sold had been gathered. Cory used to comment on that. Poverty, she said, had made the streets cleaner. (14.16)” Throughout the book, although not mentioned directly, we know the economy is not in good shape. Normal amenities such as water, or rye are valued to a point where it is unattainable, they had to get water from the rain. The value of currency is significantly decreased, and values that seem exorbitant to us, are normal in the story. “ I packed my few hundred dollars in savings—almost a thousand. It might feed me for two weeks if I’m allowed to keep it, and if I’m very careful what I buy and where I buy it.” In normal circumstances, that amount of money can last a person at least 1 month with decent spending habits, but in Laurens case the economy has fallen to a point where the worth of normal amenities are inexorably high. Throughout the book, Laurens life has been filled with unexpectedness through her journey, from the sudden loss of her father to the sudden destruction of her home along with her entire family. Another great example of unexpectedness is her sudden need to  move to the upper part of the county for a better life. Lauren had been planning this for quite some time before all the incidents occurred, she never progressed any further than just thinking of it, since she had responsibilities such as her brothers “When my family is back on its feet, we’ll marry, I said. “Then we can get out of here. I just have to know that my brothers will be alright.” That all changed when she lost all of her family, she decided to gather what she had left and started her journey up north. While her idea to move was not sudden, it was the sudden event of losing her family that caused her to move.  These events would not have occurred if it was not due to the crisis of money.  Getting out of her difficult situation is near impossible as companies will use up employees and make them go into debt  “Anyone KSF hired would have a hard time living on the salary offered. In not very much time, I think the new hires would be in debt to the company. That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery. That might work in Christopher Donner’s America. Labor laws, state and federal, are not what they once were. (pg 210)” Lauren equates the mountain of debt to slavery, and the government shows no initiation in making change. The financial crisis caused Lauren to create this lack of trust with those she associate with, the fall of the economy caused people to turn on each other and do whatever it takes to survive, “the deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing. They treated Bankole as though they doubted that he even had a sister, or that he was who he said he was. So many stolen IDs these days. They searched him and took the cash he was carrying. Fees for police services, they said. He had been careful to carry only what he thought would be enough to keep them sweet-tempered, but not enough to make them suspicious or more greedy than they already were.”  These acts  placed pressure on the many communities, as they had no choice but to deal with cops and gangs, as they wanted to believe that they have a sense of security and safety. To survive Lauren had to live in a bubble, where she can essentially trust herself, as there was no way of knowing who is your enemy and who is your friend.  When relating to the 2008 housing crisis, we can see the catastrophic  changes that can occur when governmental involvement disappears and security of money disappears. People had faith and moreover had trust in the government, hoping that their trust and money was secure in their day to day lives. Big companies took advantage of that trust and forged the truth to manipulate people into debts that they were unaware of.  Lauren and her family, especially her father, had faith that one day that the neighborhood they lived in would grow and they would escape this life of drugs, guns, and fear of security. Companies like KHF used the vulnerability of people and made them go into debt, essentially using them and disposing of them.  

At the start of the semester, I honestly had no idea what the 2008 housing crisis and how bad the generational damage was. As the semester progressed, I know now that it occurred because of manipulation along with unexpectedness. Many banks manipulated people into believing low interest rates, along with cheap financing options. These companies used the suddenness of the crisis to capitalize for monetary gain. I was around the age of six, when the crisis occurred. I have no recollection of that time nor remember any other event at such a point. When I asked my parents they told me that they were not affected by the crisis, as we lived in apartments for quite some time and did not own a home until 2016. Although I am so grateful and thankful that this did not affect me or my family, upon learning about this subject in class, I became so heartbroken at the chaos that was occurring. My dad was very keen on always having a back up plan in his life, if things did not turn out the way it was suppose to be, you would have something to fall onto to become stable. Many people during the crisis did not have a plan to fall into, as people had no reason to. Who could have expected mortgage interest rates to increase and there to be a crisis. During my semester I too also experienced a similar event of unexpectedness and its drastic consequences. During the beginning of the semester I was involved in a vehicular accident with a deer, which completely totaled my vehicle, leaving me unable to travel to campus and home. I believe one of my better qualities as a student  is my ability to stay headstrong in very stressful situations and be able to try to find a solution no matter the situation, but  these qualities seem to vanish later in the semester. In the middle of the semester, I was exposed to poison causing me to develop a temporary mental impairment. This took a great hit on my ability to perform normal tasks and especially academic activities such as completing homework, attending class, and studying for exams, thus having very low grades. I felt so weak, overwhelmed, most of all I felt lost. Even though my situation was nowhere near the same as what individuals faced when they realized their mortgage interest rate increased or when they were about to lose their home because they were not able to pay their mortgage and will be going to become homeless. I have a better understanding on how bad things can really become after your life takes an unexpected 180. I believe that the answer to both situations is to be strong and things will become better. Regardless of how bad and how unexpected a situation might become, you need to think positive and things will align themselves.

Apophenia is the ability to see connections between ideas and objects that may seem unrelated. The 2008 housing crisis, Parable of the Sower, and my academic journey this Fall 2022 semester are all different topics, but when closely analyzed they all share a connection. The housing crisis of 2008 was the mass expulsion of millions of Americans from their houses and neighborhoods. During this time, there was a rise in unemployment, which led to people not being able to pay their mortgages and ultimately resulted in mass foreclosures. The cause of the housing crisis can be attributed to the following terms: mortgage bonds, subprime loans, documentation, moral hazard, bad faith, trust, corruption, fraud, accountability, pressure, and bubble. According to Michael Lewis (2010) in The Big Short, “a mortgage bond was a claim in the cash flows from a pool of thousands of individual home mortgages” (pg 7). Creators of the mortgage bond market had a solution that ensured they would get their money back when they wanted: “they took giant pools of home loans and carved up the payments made by homeowners into pieces, called tranches” (pg 7). This relates to subprime loans because subprime loans had high-interest rates and were given to those who couldn’t afford such rates so they would be more likely to default on the loan. Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system, or procedure.

 During the housing crisis, faulty loans were given to homeowners requiring very little documentation to prove they could afford such loans. According to Oxford Languages, “A moral hazard is the lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequence”. In terms of the housing crisis, bankers and lenders were behaving in a moral hazard by providing and encouraging the sales and trades on risky loans because they knew that they would not face any major consequences from it. Lewis (2010) states: “the industry was fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people” (pg 9). When they were found out about their role in the matter, they still did not face any significant backlash; they were able to keep their jobs or resign with huge payouts. The bankers and lenders had no reason to proceed with caution because either way, they knew that they would be protected in the end. This relates to bad faith, as it is the intent to deceive. The bankers and mortgage lenders knew that they were selling risky and faulty loans to their customers, but they proceeded to mask the loans as a good business deal. They had the intent to deceive their clients because they knew they were gaining lots of revenue from the bad deal. 

All of this coincides with trust, fraud, and corruption. Americans believed that they could trust their banks to protect their money and their assets when really the banks and the lenders were abusing the American people’s trust by committing fraud, which is the wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. By assuring the American people that they would be in good hands with these loans, they were deceiving them to receive huge payouts. This connects to corruption because the bankers and lenders were behaving in dishonest and fraudulent conduct as they were the ones in power. At the height of the housing crisis, the pressure was increasing as Wall Street bankers were continually conning people into taking out bad loans. When there is too much pressure, an implosion occurs. The housing crisis was a big bubble building pressure from the rise of bad loans being sold and by a certain point it became too much and it finally burst. The bursting of the housing bubble resulted in a recession where millions of people were without homes and jobs. The Wall Street bankers and lenders knew their role in the matter but refused to take accountability for their actions by pretending to not know what was going on and that they did not foresee this crisis happening, and by trying to place blame on the common people by saying that it was their responsibility to fully understand the documents and loans they were signing and agreeing to. 

Similar to the actual housing crisis of 2008, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower also emulates the same concepts that lead to expulsion. Although this book was written in 1993 about the future, we see how the book produces a story that is not that far off from reality today. In Parable of the Sower, we meet the main character Lauren Olamina, who at the start of the novel is fifteen years old in the year 2024. She has a condition called hyper empathy where she can feel other people’s pain and pleasure, a result of her mother’s abuse of the drug paraceto. Lauren’s family consists of her father, a Baptist minister who also teaches at a nearby college; his second wife, Cory; and Lauren’s four younger half-brothers: Keith, Marcus, Bennett, and Gregory. They live in the fictional town of Robledo, California where water is scarce and expensive, there are few jobs, and climate change has produced massive rains followed by years of drought. In her neighborhood, there is also social inequality, which is the unequal distribution and access to resources. In Robledo, the neighborhood is surrounded by walls fortified with lazor wire and supposed to be bulletproof to repel attacks from intruders. This creates pressure outside the walls and pressure from inside the neighborhood. There is pressure brewing outside and inside the walls because to the less fortunate on the outside of the walls, families like the Olaminas seem very wealthy to them since they have access to food and money. There is also pressure within the family because Lauren is adamant about learning survival skills and tactics because she believes that the neighborhood will not be safe anymore. Her dad is too stubborn to realize this, and Lauren makes the statement that she won’t be able to grow if she remains under her parents. In her Earthseed notebook, she writes: “A tree cannot grow in its parents’ shadows” (pg 82). This comes from the frustration of being told that she is too young to fully understand the world around her, when in fact she is very wise for her age and more practical and realistic than her parents, who want to remain naive in their bubble and think that nothing can get worse in their neighborhood. 

In addition to the internal and external pressures Lauren faces, she also faces another kind of personal force- multiple forms of foreclosure. First, Lauren faces what is known as identity foreclosure. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, identity foreclosure, or premature commitment to an identity, is “the unquestioning acceptance by individuals (usually adolescents) of the role, values, and goals that others (e.g., parents, close friends, teachers, athletic coaches) have chosen for them”. Lauren experiences this by accepting her father’s religion although she doesn’t believe in it. She states, “at least three years ago, my father’s God stopped being my God. his church stopped being my church. And yet, today, because I’m a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn’t mine any more” (pg 7). As her story progresses, we see that Lauren fights to establish her own identity with her own thoughts and ideals, which often gets a lot of pushback from her father. This is why establishing Earthseed as her self-created religion is important to her because this is something that no one can take away from her. Next, foreclosures are generally talked about in the sense of someone’s home being seized because of missed payments. Although the government didn’t seize Lauren’s home, it was seized, taken over, and destroyed by pyro drug addicts who burned down her house. In relation to this, Lauren has to come to terms with the narrative foreclosures of her family members- the premature conviction that one’s life story has come to an end. Since she was the only one who escaped her house alive she has to assume that the rest of her family is dead.

Overall, Lauren’s journey was turbulent. Life as she knew it used to be normal until it got turned upside down due to the actions of others. Water is privatized, there’s pressure to grow food, drugs have infiltrated the community, and company towns are beginning to take over. Even though Lauren was semi-prepared for the worst to occur, it is still a devastating tragedy to lose her family and everything she once knew. Similarly, the same can be said for those affected during the housing crisis- they thought they were living normal lives until their homes and jobs got ripped from underneath them. The life that they once knew, they were unable to upkeep now. Both the housing crisis and Parable of the Sower reveal how tragedies bring on a change in perspective. For Lauren, the only thing she could do was to keep moving forward and keep moving north to find better shelter. Once settled, she named it acorn, a homage to her family, and she held a tribute for all the lives that were lost along the way. For those affected by the housing crisis, although it must’ve been hard, they found a way to rebuild their lives back from the ground up. 

This matters because given GLOBE’s insistence that Geneseo students should gain practice in the ability to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time”, I can use the housing crisis and Parable of the Sower as guides for what to do when faced with adversity. College is not easy and it is never an easy ride. Although my journey this year wasn’t as devastating compared to those in the housing crisis or in Parable of the Sower, it still is something I can be proud of. Before this semester, the last semester that I completed was the Fall of 2021 and it was horrible. Academically, I was at my lowest. Spring 2022 was my initial graduation date, but I had to take a medical leave of absence. Coming back for this semester, I was registered for six classes, and I was faced with a huge bill because I lost student aid due to poor grades. I’ve already been placed on academic probation before, so the pressure to not fall back into old patterns was high. Similarly to Lauren and those from the housing crisis, I could be facing my own expulsion- expulsion from financial aid and from the college, I knew that I had to make a rebound this semester- other semesters may have been poor academically, but that does not define who I am as a person and as a student. Everyone is allowed setbacks, what matters is how they make a comeback. 

Specifically in this English 111 course, my performance at the beginning of the semester started off fine. Towards the middle of the semester, it got rocky because my attendance was declining. At this point, I wasn’t behaving in good faith: I was not communicating with Dr. McCoy about my absences and I was also missing class to do other assignments for other classes. I had let this English course fall down on my list of priorities. After having a meeting with Dr. McCoy, I vowed to change my behavior and to also start behaving in good faith so I could finish the semester strong. Since then, I’ve only missed about two classes due to sickness instead of randomly disappearing to do work for other classes. I started to be present in class more and in my work. I was doing the readings more often and that was evident in my ability to answer the reading quizzes and what I add to small group discussions when we have group essays. Compared to previous semesters, my academic performance has greatly improved in all of my classes. I am very confident that I will pass all six of my classes with A’s and B’s. As for financial aid, after two long months, I was able to appeal to regain my aid based on how well I am currently doing this semester. And it was granted. In the past, I faced personal troubles that led me towards facing expulsion from school. For instance, I had a lack of motivation to even be in school and it affected my attendance in classes and my consistency with assignments. I was put on academic probation more than once and I had to complete a semester of academic boot camp to be back in good standing. Coming back this semester, I knew that the pressure to not fall back into old habits was high. I had to fight against forces that would have otherwise led me down the same path as before. I had to find the motivation to do well this semester. It was overwhelming, as there were many times I could have given up and even wanted to, but I had to remember the end goal. I needed to prove to not only just myself but also others such as financial aid that I can be academically successful. My journey this semester has been nothing short of easy. Similarly to Lauren, she knew that she wanted to spread Earthseed with others so that one day it “could take root among the stars” (pg 77). By being persistent, and never losing sight of her goal despite the tragedies along the way she was able to make great strides toward her goal. I can say the same for myself because my main goal is to finish college and graduate with my degree. I have come too far and too close to give up or to let things inconvenience me and I also cannot be an inconvenience to myself. This relates to Geneseo’s GLOBE because by reflecting on past actions, I can make better changes to ensure myself a different outlook for the future. The ability to do this is important for anyone no matter their background, discipline, or path in life. 

In 2008 the world faced a global financial crisis. This began with corruption and fraud that would fester and spread throughout the large businesses and government. According to the Inside Job, a documentary from 2010, big businesses involved within the financial industry abused their powers to obtain more and more money. One of the first things they did was to utilize Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDOs. The CDOs were toxic, wreaking financial havoc on the investors who used them. The CDOs were bad, and would cost customers innumerable amounts of money. The businesses, on the other hand, would only make more money. The more money investors lost, the more money the businesses made. Additionally, rating companies were paid to push out high ratings for CDOs and other investments. Everything became rated triple A, which investors would trust to mean that it was safe to invest. However, this would only cost the investors everything they had. The documentary also touched upon other fraud occurring in this time period, more specifically within the housing industry. The home foreclosure rate was skyrocketing. Banks would grant people loans that were more than the customer could ever pay back. People would take loans out for homes they could not afford, and consequently lose their deposit. Then, companies would purchase homes, then sell the mortgage to either themselves, or other companies, and purchase them again in a repeated cycle. This topic is mentioned in the podcast, The Giant Pool of Money. The treatment of mortgages drove up the price for homes, ruining the housing industry. People were losing their money, their homes, everything. Inside Job also discussed when the market for CDOs crashed, plunging the entire world into an economic crisis. The banks, relying on the CDOs, went bankrupt. The banks had global reach, destroying the economies of other countries. There was a mass recession; people were laid off from work and expelled from their homes. However, according to Inside Job, those who were responsible for the crisis were able to walk away with their fortunes intact. There were little to no repercussions for them; most were either allowed to resign or kept with financial compensation in the millions. The world that was in existence in 2008 could be described as an apocalyptic dystopian world. People were forced to leave their homes, held no jobs, and were largely homeless and angry. There was mistrust towards the government and the banking industry. The book The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, takes place in a world plagued with mistrust and terror.

The world in The Parable of the Sower is destroyed by climate change, drugs, and disease. The world has turned to an apocalyptic one, where the weather is extreme and the people are worse. People go around doing whatever they want. This can include killing, raping, stealing, doing drugs, and even commiting arson. People tend to have low empathy, and the majority of the world is considered dog-eat-dog. The police do nothing to help those in need, and the government is extremely radical and does little to help the people. Water is rare, and therefore extremely expensive. On top of that, well-paying jobs are becoming scarce. The story follows Lauren Oya Olamina on her journey of religion and faith. Lauren lives with her family in a gated community in Robleto, Los Angeles. Her home is surrounded by a protective gate. Lauren lives with her father, stepmother, and her four half-brothers. Lauren’s community is held together by religion, Lauren’s father leading the community in their faith with his sermons. Her father is a professor and Baptist pastor. The people of her community all fervently believe in their faith, as it is one of the few things they have from their days before the apocalypse. Lauren, however, does not believe in the same God that her family does. Lauren believes that God is Change, and that her religion is meant to prepare people to live amongst the stars. She believes that the key to humanity’s future is a life in space. Lauren calls the religion “Earthseed” and develops it in secret. In an act of rebellion Keith, Lauren’s half-brother, runs away and works with a group outside the walls. Inevitably, Keith is found dead, having been tortured up until his death. Soon after, Lauren’s father goes missing. After these tragedies, only more misfortune falls upon the community. A group of outsiders break into the gated community, leaving only three survivors: Lauren, Harry Balter and Zahra Moss. The three survivors decide to head North, with Lauren disguised as a man. On their journey they meet several people, many of which join them. Lauren teaches the group about Earthseed, and many join. One person who joins is Taylor Bankole, a doctor who owns land up in Northern California. The group decides to head to that property, as it is their safest bet. During the journey, Bankhole and Laura form a relationship. Once the group arrives at Bankhole’s land, they form the very first Earthseed community: Acorn.

The novel itself tells an incredible story of Lauren’s journey in developing Earthseed and spreading it. However, with the course concepts from the course “Expulsion and the Housing Crisis” in mind, the story changes slightly. In the course, we learn about the housing and expulsion crisis of 2008, and its effects on the economy and the people alike. Some of the course concepts include trust, fraud, moral hazard, apophenia, and expulsion. Throughout the course we have consumed various types of media. We have watched documentaries, listened to podcasts, and read novels. With each media, we were to make connections between the prior works we consumed, and utilize our course concepts. Parable of the Sower was the last thing we worked with, meaning we had an arsenal of prior knowledge to use when we read it. Knowing that we were meant to make connections from the novel, I read it differently. As I read, I looked for examples of expulsion, trust, and fraud. This in itself is an example of apophenia. Apophenia, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things.” Essentially, the tendency that people have to make connections between two things that are not necessarily connected. Octavia E. Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993, 15 years before the 2008 market crash. Therefore it is highly unlikely that this novel was intended to have connections to the crash.

 However as a student, if I am meant to look for connections, I will look for connections. For example, one could say that Lauren is expelled from her home, just like how several people in 2008 were. Or that the takeover of Lauren’s community could be considered a hostile takeover. The Investopedia definition of hostile takeover is “the acquisition of one company by another corporation against the wishes of the former.” Lauren’s gated community could be considered the company that gets taken over, and the group of outsiders could be considered the corporation that takes over the first company. Suddenly, a connection has been made between the business world and the novel. In reality, the two technically have no correlation, they only happen to have things in common. Looking for connections means you will make connections, whether or not there are any to be found. Someone reading the book for pleasure would likely not try to connect the Parable of the Sower to the 2008 housing and expulsion crisis, and they certainly would not connect it to William Shakespeare’s King Lear. However both King Lear and Parable of the Sower have themes of accountability. In both novels, accountability comes in the form of death. In King Lear, Edmund is the second born of his father, Gloucester, and is illegitimate. Gloucester’s first, legitimate son, Edgar, is to inherit Gloucester’s land and title. Edmund is jealous over the fact that his brother will inherit everything due to his legitimacy. Eventually Edmund hatches a plot to kill both his brother and his father. He successfully gets rid of them both, however Edgar lives. Edmund even manages to dethrone King Lear and take his throne. Later on, Edgar comes back and challenges his brother to a duel. Edgar wins the duel by stabbing Edmund, which kills him. Arguably, Edmund pays for his crimes with his life, and therefore he is held accountable. In The Parable of the Sower, Lauren’s half-brother Keith goes on an unapproved trip outside the gates of their community. During this trip he gets jumped by outsiders, and subsequently loses a key to the gates. After being reprimanded by his father, Keith runs away and joins a group of thieves outside the gates. Keith thrives for a while, but unfortunately is murdered. As Lauren states, “The body was Keith’s…Someone had cut and burned away most of my brother’s skin. Everywhere except his face. They burned out his eyes…” (Butler 112-113). It could be argued that for stealing and losing the key, Keith was punished with death. Therefore, Keith was held accountable in the end. In reality, these two deaths have nothing in common. Connections made are ones I drew specifically for this essay. I made these connections in order to show how easy it is to fall victim to apophenia.

At SUNY Geneseo GLOBE, A Geneseo Education for a Connected World, insists that students should gain practice in the ability to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time.” The course “Expulsion and the Housing Crisis” accomplishes just this. Throughout this semester, we have learned more and more about the 2008 crisis. Using the knowledge we have gained, we looked at the various works in the course differently. In other words, our knowledge gained in this class changed how we viewed other works. The fact that I was able to make connections between otherwise disconnected works means that the course did its job. Beyond that, each work we looked at was from a different time period. For example Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine was published in 2010, and William Shakespeare’s King Lear was first performed in 1606. Each of these works were written separately and in different time periods. However, each work has certain themes and connections that can be made, and all can be connected to the 2008 crisis. Knowledge can change perception, just as it changed my reading of Parable of the Sower. Knowledge is a powerful tool, and it helped my class observe the changes in outlook over time. Each media we consumed related to the crisis in some form or another. However, each work also contained its own outlook on its story or lesson. These individual stories and works become part of a large web of information that we have spun for this course. While some connections were forged intentionally by us, others may have been made unintentionally by the authors. 

Admittedly, I have enjoyed this class. It has given me a new perspective and appreciation for concepts relating to the 2008 crisis. I might never have read Toni Morrison’s A Mercy if I had never taken this course, as I had not heard of it prior. Additionally, I can now make connections to the 2008 crisis. For example, the dinosaurs in Michael Criton’s Jurassic Park, were made in bad faith, a course concept. Knowing about the past crisis also allows for the understanding of how such things happen sometimes, and how they may happen again. Knowing about the past helps prepare for the future.

The 2008 Crisis, also known as the 2008 Housing Crisis, was an event that not only hurt the United States economy, but the other countries connected as well. This resulted in a Global Financial Crisis, causing the rich to get richer, and the poor to get poorer. The crisis was caused by carelessness practices in the US Government and on Wall Street, and were all preventable. We learned about the events leading to the 2008 Crisis through Inside Job, the documentary going into detail of what happened in the decades leading to and proceeding the bubble popping through interviews with US Government officials of the time, and many people from who caused the crisis all together through their actions. We also learned about events before and after the crisis in the book The Big Short, which did the same thing as Inside Job but went more in depth about how many people on Wall Street had no clue what they had been doing by creating all these agreements to loan money despite having no way to return the money. Wall Street had known this was a terrible idea for these people but had no idea the long term effects and financial consequences. We see these consequences in both the novel The Turner House and the short documentary, The Old Man and the Storm. Both the novel and documentary follows families who each have families being affected by the crisis, and not being affected at all. In The Old Man and the Storm, an old man of New Orleans, was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. He wants to save his family’s home and community by staying even though everyone else moved away, to rebuild. Only problem was that the bubble had only burst a year prior. This now left Herbert Gettridge, at almost eighty-five years old, to work to be able to afford his build, and building alone to try and make his home liveable with no power and no one else really rebuilding their homes. Everyone else just kind of gave up after the money the government promised never came. The novel The Turner House follows a large family, just like Mr. Gettridge had, and in the wake of the 2008 crisis, they must decide whether or not to sell their childhood home when their mom falls too sick and weak to take care of herself anymore. Also like Mr. Gettridge, their family ranges from really being affected by the crisis to not really making a difference to some. These sources gave us knowledge we did not have prior to the class as we were so young when the crisis began and many followed themes that the crisis followed as well. 

The last novel we read really helped understand how a financial crisis can impact the world. In Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia Butler, the novel follows a young girl in the years 2024 through 2027 who lives in a time where many people are struggling financially and most are homeless. Financial ruin causes people to turn to violence and stealing to be able to provide food and money for themselves and family. This causes many families to move to villages with walls around them to keep the violence, drugs, and animals out.  Things like food, water, amd money are hard to come by, so Laurens father keeps a job at a college and keeps his neighborhood safe in his free time. In the neighborhood, it begins with small things going missing, but all hell breaks loose after a bullet from beyond the wall hits a child through the gate. Shortly after, Laurens father disappears and people from beyond the wall who use a drug to make setting fire feel good, destroys their homes and kills many of the people from the cul de sac, including the rest of Laurens family. She flees with two other survivors heading north, for Canada, to escape the mess of America. Along the way she and her group meet many other people, including Bankhole, her older boyfriend, who is heading for his sister’s farmland in California. Lauren reluctantly agrees to join and they find the house torched, but she decides it’s the perfect place to start a new society with her new family. This novel is like many of the other resources we’ve used to learn about the 2008 Financial Crisis. For example, this story had many characters, especially after they left Robledo. After leaving we met many people also seeking refuge from the situation in the US. We also saw many characters in The Big Short, Inside Job and in The Turner House. We also see the characters facing a crisis, like Mr.Gettridge in The Old Man and the Storm, where his world is in shambles, and he cannot afford to or find a way to fix and rebuild their neighborhood. We also see many being expelled, expulsion is a theme throughout every text and documentary we’ve used this semester, from King Lear  to A Mercy. Many of the themes from sources used this semester have helped us understand the 2008 crisis better. 

There are many themes in both Parable of the Sower that many faced in the 2008 crisis. One example is that the world in the novel had many of the same problems, such as high prices on gas, bread, and water. In the beginning of the novel, Lauren talks about the prices of groceries being so high, they make bread from acorns and they catch rain water to recycle instead of buying clean water. I know from both The Turner House and from talking with my parents after watching Inside Job that the prices on foods and other goods went up, this included a spike in gas prices as my dad had told me, and housing, that Lelah from The Turner House taught me. She just jumped from place to place to have somewhere to stay as she could not actually afford to live there with no job and a gambling addiction. Which also brings me to my next point, that in Parable of the Sower and The Turner House, there were themes of addiction. In Parable of the Sower, it was to drugs that would cause violence, such as the one that makes fire better than sex, or the one Laurens mother used while she was pregnant that gave Lauren too much empathy, causing her to physically feel other peoples pain. Another example of addiction and gamling was seen in Inside Job, The Big Short, and throughout the crisis in 2008. Many of the men on Wall Street used drugs, such as cocaine, and then gambled with people’s money and homes, mostly causing the people with less, to really end up with less. Like in The Turner House, many ended up homeless. Homelessness and expulsion from one’s home is another connection between all the sources from this class. In Parable of the Sower, the poor are forced onto the streets and turn to violence to be able to get goods. In 2008, many people were homeless and forced to either live in a car, like Lelah in The Turner House, or forced into tent camps as we saw in The Old Man and the Storm. Expulsion was a theme seen repeatedly throughout all of our resources, and throughout the crisis. This theme ranges from novels like Parable of the Sower, written in 1994, way before the bubble burst in the crisis, but this theme is seen over and over throughout history, it was also a theme in King Lear written in around 1605, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company website. Expulsion was a theme easily predicted to happen once again, as it happened forever. In this course, we learned not only about what happened in 2008 and how it was preventable and just a result of negligence, but also the themes such as expulsion and bubbling. And we see these things happening in 1605, all the way until now, possibly facing another financial crisis caused by the pandemic. The concept of GLOBE’s statement that students are gaining practice to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time”, can be seen through the course. We learned about expulsion in King Lear and how it affected them in a pre-christan british society, we learned how expulsion affected Florens in A Mercy in the 17th century when she was given up by her mother as part of a trade. We see how this theme stays present throughout the course and how it has affected each time period, even with Parable of the Sower being set in the future. We can use our sources of information to learn from the 2008 crisis, and try to prevent that from happening, by using GLOBE’s goal of reflection to learn from past mistakes for a better future. 

This class has taught me so much about not only the 2008 housing crisis and the key concepts and themes seen throughout, but about collaboration and the importance of slowing down and dissecting. Maybe if the people of Wall Street took this course, they would have slowed down to understand that their actions had serious consequences. If they would have cared or not since it benefited them, is another topic, but they truly had no clue what they were doing, but they not only gambled with the economy but the wealth of the people, which caused distrust in the government, banks, loans, and Wall Street in general.

The 2008 Crisis, also known as the 2008 Housing Crisis, was an event that not only hurt the United States economy, but the other countries connected as well. This resulted in a Global Financial Crisis, causing the rich to get richer, and the poor to get poorer. The crisis was caused by carelessness practices in the US Government and on Wall Street, and were all preventable. We learned about the events leading to the 2008 Crisis through Inside Job, the documentary going into detail of what happened in the decades leading to and proceeding the bubble popping through interviews with US Government officials of the time, and many people from who caused the crisis all together through their actions. We also learned about events before and after the crisis in the book The Big Short, which did the same thing as Inside Job but went more in depth about how many people on Wall Street had no clue what they had been doing by creating all these agreements to loan money despite having no way to return the money. Wall Street had known this was a terrible idea for these people but had no idea the long term effects and financial consequences. We see these consequences in both the novel The Turner House and the short documentary, The Old Man and the Storm. Both the novel and documentary follows families who each have families being affected by the crisis, and not being affected at all. In The Old Man and the Storm, an old man of New Orleans, was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. He wants to save his family’s home and community by staying even though everyone else moved away, to rebuild. Only problem was that the bubble had only burst a year prior. This now left Herbert Gettridge, at almost eighty-five years old, to work to be able to afford his build, and building alone to try and make his home liveable with no power and no one else really rebuilding their homes. Everyone else just kind of gave up after the money the government promised never came. The novel The Turner House follows a large family, just like Mr. Gettridge had, and in the wake of the 2008 crisis, they must decide whether or not to sell their childhood home when their mom falls too sick and weak to take care of herself anymore. Also like Mr. Gettridge, their family ranges from really being affected by the crisis to not really making a difference to some. These sources gave us knowledge we did not have prior to the class as we were so young when the crisis began and many followed themes that the crisis followed as well. 

The last novel we read really helped understand how a financial crisis can impact the world. In Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia Butler, the novel follows a young girl in the years 2024 through 2027 who lives in a time where many people are struggling financially and most are homeless. Financial ruin causes people to turn to violence and stealing to be able to provide food and money for themselves and family. This causes many families to move to villages with walls around them to keep the violence, drugs, and animals out.  Things like food, water, amd money are hard to come by, so Laurens father keeps a job at a college and keeps his neighborhood safe in his free time. In the neighborhood, it begins with small things going missing, but all hell breaks loose after a bullet from beyond the wall hits a child through the gate. Shortly after, Laurens father disappears and people from beyond the wall who use a drug to make setting fire feel good, destroys their homes and kills many of the people from the culdesac, including the rest of Laurens family. She flees with two other survivors heading north, for Canada, to escape the mess of America. Along the way her and her group meet many other people, including Bankhole, her older boyfriend, who is heading for his sisters farmland in California. Lauren reluctantly agreed to join and they find the house torched, but she decides its the perfect place to start a new society with her new family. This novel is like many of the other resources we’ve used to learn about the 2008 Financial Crisis. For example, this story had many characters, especially after they left Robledo. After leaving we meet many people also seeking refuge from the situation in the US. We also saw many characters in The Big Short, Inside Job and in The Turner House. We also see the characters facing a crisis, like Mr.Gettridge in The Old Man and the Storm, where his world is in shambles, and he cannot afford to or find a way to fix and rebuild their neighborhood. We also see many being expelled, expulsion is a theme throughout every text and documentary we’ve used this semester, from King Lear  to A Mercy. Many of the themes from sources used this semester have helped us understand the 2008 crisis better. 

There are many themes in both Parable of the Sower that many faced in the 2008 crisis. One example is that the world in the novel had many of the same problems, such as high prices on gas, bread, and water. In the beginning of the novel, Lauren talks about the prices of groceries being so high, they make bread from acorns and they catch rain water to recycle instead of buying clean water. I know from both The Turner House and from talking with my parents after watching Inside Job that the prices on foods and other goods went up, this included a spike in gas prices as my dad had told me, and housing, that Lelah from The Turner House taught me. She just jumped from place to place to have somewhere to stay as she could not actually afford to live there with no job and a gambling addiction. Which also brings me to my next point, that in Parable of the Sower and The Turner House, there were themes of addiction. In Parable of the Sower, it was to drugs that would cause violence, such as the one that makes fire better than sex, or the one Laurens mother used while she was pregnant that gave Lauren too much empathy, causing her to physically feel other peoples pain. Another example of addiction and gamling was seen in Inside Job, The Big Short, and throughout the crisis in 2008. Many of the men on Wall Street used drugs, such as cocaine, and then gambled with people’s money and homes, mostly causing the people with less, to really end up with less. Like in The Turner House, many ended up homeless. Homelessness and expulsion from one’s home is another connection between all the sources from this class. In Parable of the Sower, the poor are forced onto the streets and turn to violence to be able to get goods. In 2008, many people were homeless and forced to either live in a car, like Lelah in The Turner House, or forced into tent camps as we saw in The Old Man and the Storm. Expulsion was a theme seen repeatedly throughout all of our resources, and throughout the crisis. This theme ranges from novels like Parable of the Sower, written in 1994, way before the bubble burst in the crisis, but this theme is seen over and over throughout history, it was also a theme in King Lear written in around 1605, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company website. Expulsion was a theme easily predicted to happen once again, as it happened forever. In this course, we learned not only about what happened in 2008 and how it was preventable and just a result of negligence, but also the themes such as expulsion and bubbling. And we see these things happening in 1605, all the way until now, possibly facing another financial crisis caused by the pandemic. The concept of GLOBE’s statement that students are gaining practice to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time”, can be seen through the course. We learned about expulsion in King Lear and how it affected them in a pre-christan british society, we learned how expulsion affected Florens in A Mercy in the 17th century when she was given up by her mother as part of a trade. We see how this theme stays present throughout the course and how it has affected each time period, even with Parable of the Sower being set in the future. We can use our sources of information to learn from the 2008 crisis, and try to prevent that from happening, by using GLOBE’s goal of reflection to learn from past mistakes for a better future. 

This class has taught me so much about not only the 2008 housing crisis and the key concepts and themes seen throughout, but about collaboration and the importance of slowing down and dissecting. Maybe if the people of Wall Street took this course, they would have slowed down to understand that their actions had serious consequences. If they would have cared or not since it benefited them, is another topic, but they truly had no clue what they were doing, but they not only gambled with the economy but the wealth of the people, which caused distrust in the government, banks, loans, and Wall Street in general.

In 2008 there was a huge problem related to housing and it was labeled a crisis. Many factors led to the 2008 housing crash such as loans that were given out with little documentation or variable interest rate to help people buy their homes that didn’t have the income to afford it. The problem with this is that those said people were unable to pay back these loans (banks already knew they weren’t gonna be able to but gave it to them anyway) which essentially forced them to leave their homes and find shelter elsewhere. Americans faced financial disaster as the value of their homes dropped well below the amount they had borrowed, and subprime interest rates spiked. Many people relied on these loans to pay for their houses but had no idea the banks/ sellers knew they couldn’t pay it back as a way to get more money or expel them for their housing, “His job was to be a CDO “expert,” but he actually didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about what was in CDOs. His goal, he explained, was to maximize the dollars in his care” (Lewis, page 151). This just shows the greed of bankers and their only goal was to make more money. Over the course of the semester we have focused on this crisis in various forms through various books. One of them being The Big Short, as well as Parable of the Sower. These books correspond with each other in the way that the people of the books have been forced out and expelled from their homes. But, the way this happens seems to be different for them. 

The Big Short focuses on the financial aspect of the housing crisis. How lenders and banks knew exactly what they were doing and had the people tricked, which essentially led to the fall of the housing market and left people without a place to stay. Shadiness is one way to describe the leading to this awful event. In the early 2000s, an obscure but well-respected investor named Michael Burry makes a shocking discovery: the U.S. housing market is about to collapse. Over the past two decades, the big banks have made it a habit to bundle together Americans’ home mortgages into bonds known as “CDOs,” which they trade amongst themselves for higher and higher prices. The quality of those loans has been declining in recent years, making it likely that many CDOs will go bad. These bad loans are known as “subprime mortgages.” Banks are targeting immigrants and other members of the working class and suckering them in with low interest rates, only to jack up the prices after a two-year grace period. This is only the first problem. The second is these people with bad loans can’t actually pay them back. One prime example of this stated in the book is, “They’d phone up an originator and say, “Don’t tell anybody, but if you bring me a pool of loans teeming with high thin-file FICO scores I’ll pay you more for it than anyone else.” (Lewis, page 46). As the subprime market grows, it becomes advantageous for banks to find people who they know won’t be able to pay them back, because then they’ll make a killing off of jacked-up interest prices and fees. This scheme ends up impacting working-class immigrants more than anyone else, essentially screwing them over and forcing them to be expelled. 

The narrator and protagonist, Lauren Olamina in Parable of the Sower gives us an insight into her world about how she, as well as many others, had to flee their homes due to a crisis. Now, unlike The Big Short, Parable of the Sower sheds light onto a different issue, drug use. People labeled “Pyros” were using a drug of this name. This drug makes the experience of watching a fire burn “better than sex” and thus encourages addicts to burn everything in sight (Butler, pages 143-144). Not only are there major consequences of this drug affiliated gang activity such as the burning of  houses, but also people are dying. No one is safe in their own home anymore. Everyone is on edge. The summer shortly after her 18th birthday, Laurens community is overrun by pyros, burning, raping, killing all its inhabitants. Lauren has this idea to think ahead. She wants to go North and escape it all. She had returned to her neighborhood to look for survivors and recover what she could from her former home. She finds people digging through the rubble, one survivor she finds is named Harry Butler and another named Zahra Moss. Laren, as well as Harry, want to go North. Zahra agrees as well. So they start their journey. Along their journey they find many others similar to them and they become a group trying to find shelter. There are about 12 of them. They all are following Lauren and her self- made religion, Earthseed. One of her followers she met along the way is Bankole. Like everyone else, Bankole says, he’s just making his way north to start a new life someplace safe. Lauren suspects that he has a definite destination in mind—the home of a relative or friend, perhaps. Later, she finds out she is correct. Bankole owns three hundred acres of land on which his younger sister and her husband have built a house. Eventually Lauren and all her disciples agree to start a new life together in this area. They Mourn and put to rest the ones who they have lost and have passed due to this tragedy. They have named their new community Acorn, a symbol of new life, hope, and possibility. 

Throughout this process of learning about the housing crisis and using background knowledge of that to expand on other topics and books, there has been tremendous growth in my education. Firstly, if I had not been put in this class I would not have learned about the 2008 housing crisis. When I was first introduced to this class I thought it was only gonna be about this crisis. But instead we read books surrounding the topic and we got to see different perspectives. Not only did I learn about the housing crisis but I also learned that it can be labeled a housing crisis not just because of financials and mortgages, but as well as other facts. For reference, Parable of the Sower talks about how they were forced out due to drug use and thieves who set fire to housing. This can be labeled a housing crisis that had nothing to do with finance rather than havoc. My interpretation of things supports the idea that Geneseo students should gain practice in the ability to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time.” As soon as I was put into this class I thought I was going to hate it because it involved finance and mortgages which I despised, but as the semester went on I feel like I actually learned a lot of useful information and my learning has since expanded. Connections were made that would never have been possible if I wasn’t introduced to the subjects of this class and learning is a process which will always keep growing. 

The 2008 housing crisis was an event that expelled people from the homes they have been familiar with throughout their entire lives, the jobs that allow them to provide for themselves or a family, and stripped several individuals of their hard-earned savings. Not only did the crisis result in great amounts of financial stress, but also took an emotional toll on many. Although this event may have come as a surprise to most, it was not completely unanticipated. According to the book, The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, a group of investors recognized the faults of major Wall Street banks when they realized that the subprime mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations known as CDOs being sold for much more than they were worth were essentially worthless. These CDOs were viewed as an opportunity by banks to make a profit off individuals with low credit-scores and no other options. The group realized that as soon as the current housing prices stopped rising, these CDOs would be detrimental to the economy. The book states, “To Charlie and Ben and Jamie it seemed perfectly clear that Wall Street was propping up the price of these CDOs so that they might either dump losses on unsuspecting customers or make a last few billion dollars from a corrupt market. In either case, they were squeezing and selling the juice from oranges that were undeniably rotten. By late March 2007, ‘We were pretty sure one of two things was true,’ said Charlie. ‘Either the game was totally rigged, or we had gone totally fucking crazy. The fraud was so obvious that it seemed to us it had implications for democracy. We actually got scared’”. (Lewis 165-166). This clearly shows how apparent the fraud was and that there were people anticipating the fall of the housing and stock market.  It was their greed that influenced them to turn their findings into a profit. By purchasing credit default swaps, these investors anticipated that once the housing market inevitably crashed, their credit default swaps could be sold for much more than they originally paid.

            Although the crisis is largely centered around the economic effects that occurred, the emotional outcomes of the crisis reached many. Because several people were handed mortgages to purchase homes they could not realistically afford, they were forcefully expelled from their homes after the crash of the stock and housing market, and foreclosures had reached an all-time high. This left people finding themselves suddenly without a home, feeling desperate or hopeless, and running low on options. Not only did this have a negative impact on the mental state of those effected, but this also often resulted in further issues such as addiction. The novel, The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy exemplifies how expulsion can allocate one in the spiral into further issues. After being evicted from her apartment and fired from her job due to failure to pay back borrowed money from her coworkers, Lelah is left with no other options than to move into her vacant childhood home. Due to the position she is put in, Lelah begins to struggle with a gambling addiction. The novel states, “The chips looked like candy. Pastel, melt-away things that didn’t make sense to save. The feel of them, the click and dry slide of them in her palm, was gratifying. Some people in gamblers anonymous, a place she hadn’t been in months, claimed the tiny ball, spinning and spinning around on its wheel, was the reason they loved the game. ‘It’s like you get a bonus, little bit of show from that ball,’ Zach, a white man who always wore a suit and tie, once said. Other people in the group had nodded knowingly” (Flournoy 43).  Because of her lack of money and recent eviction, Lelah is an easy target in the world of gambling because money is what she needs the most.  Lelah’s situation was not an uncommon occurrence during the 2008 crisis. Feelings of panic and desperation following expulsion put many in a vulnerable situation, easily susceptible to addictions such as gambling. The crisis often left people with little to no places to turn.

            Not only did the crisis deeply impact big banks and investors, borrowers of subprime mortgages, and fictional characters, but also families across America like mine. I entered this class with a slight understanding of what this crisis entailed simply from my personal experience, but after learning about the crisis in-depth and relating several works of literature to the event, my knowledge flourished. I have been able to view this event from the perspective of many individuals besides myself who was four at the time. During the 2008 housing crisis, my dad was exclusively self-employed selling anti-virus and encryption software. Because of the crisis, his business never fully recovered from the drop in revenue. Overall, there were less businesses and therefore less demand for the software he was selling. In order to augment his earnings, he took on a full-time job at a water treatment plant working overnight while continuing to run his business. Because he was essentially working around the clock, my time with him was limited to brief family dinners. My family not only suffered financially but emotionally as well. Many families throughout America were reached by these issues. Whether it be parents taking on multiple jobs to supplement their usual earnings, struggling with mental health issues or addiction such as gambling, or even being expelled from one’s home, the effects were felt nationwide.

            Although set 16 years after the 2008 housing crisis, the novel, Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler can be closely compared to the crisis. Many of the issues that arose in 2008 are mirrored in the novel. The issues seen within Parable of the Sower can be attributed to climate change and economic crises much like the recession of 2008. One of the main ideas present in both the housing crisis and Parable of the Sower is the concept of expulsion. After her town is invaded, Lauren is forcibly expelled from her home and everything she knows. Lauren is stripped of her home, her belongings, and the safety that she once had of living in a gated community. She suddenly finds herself without a home or places to turn, much like those that were expelled in 2008. As she is fleeing her home, Lauren states, “I stood at the gate, staring in as strangers picked among the black bones of our homes. The ruins were still smoking, but men, women, and children were all over them, digging through them, picking fruit from the trees, stripping our dead, quarreling or fighting over new acquisitions, stashing things away in clothing or bundles… Who were these people?” (Butler 158). This image of people invading and taking Lauren’s belongings in and around her home directly compares to what many faced during the 2008 crisis. When evicted, people were forced to only take what they could and leave the rest behind. Lauren is looking behind her to see a mere skeleton of the house she once lived in with the knowledge that it is no longer her home, and she can never return. This is a similar concept faced by those expelled in 2008. Within The Turner House, Lelah’s eviction is comparable to the situation that Lauren is placed in. The novel states, “Lelah had received a few thirty-day notices but always cleared out before the Demand for Possession -a seven-day notice- slid under her door. Seven days might as well have been none this time around; before Lelah knew it the bailiffs we’re knocking, telling her she had two hours to grab what she could, that they would toss whatever she left behind into that dumpster outside” (Flournoy 13). The concept of losing one’s home as well as the majority of one’s belongings can be deeply saddening as our belongings are often what give us our sense of self. Lauren’s life in Parable of the Sower directly coordinates to the events of the 2008 housing crisis as she is forced to leave behind her home and everything inside of it, much like Lelah from The Turner House.

            The housing crisis of 2008 was enveloped by the fraud, trust washing, and detrimental mistakes of big banks and investors in which many people’s lives were turned upside-down. Greed also played a large role in the drive to make money off of unknowing victims as seen in The Big Short. The economical perspective of what happened in 2008 does not even begin to summarize the crisis as there was countless emotional issues brought about with it. Many families such as mine deeply felt the effects of the crisis and were forced to work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. These emotional impacts often led to issues such as addiction during times of vulnerability and desperation which was exemplified in The Turner House. Many similarities can be found between the novel, Parable of the Sower, and the housing crisis. Despite being set in the future, expulsion is a prevalent theme within the novel, and it is comparable to the challenges faced by those that lived through the recession. The 2008 housing crisis was an event so impactful that it can be seen represented in several works of literature, and its effects still resonate today.

Throughout the semester of English 111, we focused our attention mainly on the causes and effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. Our readings of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and, most recently, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower all tied back to the 2008 crisis. In some cases, like The Big Short and The Turner House, the novels were about the financial crisis, and it was just a matter of analyzing them. However, in King Lear, A Mercy, and Parable of the Sower, it was not a matter of reading about a subject, but rather interpreting a separate setting and plot and comparing it back to the events of the 2008 financial crisis. 

The 2008 financial crisis had its roots when there began to be an increase in subprime mortgages. A subprime mortgage is a mortgage targeted at a borrower with less-than-perfect credit and savings. Because of the increase in subprime mortgages and at-risk borrowers, there began to be an increase in consumer debt. The increasing amount of debt caused the financial markets to begin to crash. As time went on, big banks began converting to holding companies instead of investment banks. It’s entirely possible that, had the responsible parties taken action earlier on to fix the mistakes of giving subprime mortgages to at-risk borrowers, the recession could have been minimized or entirely avoided. But, since the companies weren’t worried about their own well-being, they didn’t take action to change the outcome of the situation.  This is seen in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, in which Lewis follows the story of higher-up businessmen who are not only evading the struggle of the 2008 crisis but benefiting from the struggles of the lower class. Upper-level traders learned that something was going to go wrong with the subprime mortgage market, but chose to keep this information to themselves so that they can benefit afterward. Eventually, after the subprime mortgage bubble has burst and the dust settles on the situation, they have all financially benefited. 

Parable of the Sower, our most recent read, is told through the journal of our protagonist, Lauren Olamina. The setting is the fictional town of Robledo, California in 2024, in a time where climate change and inflation have worsened so extremely that water is barely affordable to the general public, and many people have been forced to resort to living on the street, committing robberies and murders in order to stay alive. Lauren and her family are lucky enough to live in a gated community, with a handful of other families who she’s known her entire life. Things begin to go downhill with the death of her brother after he leaves the community, and then the disappearance of her father. Then, criminals from outside the community break down the gate, burn down the houses, and kill everyone they can. Thanks to quick thinking and a survival pack that she had stowed away in her closet, Lauren survives and begins the journey on the road. Accompanied at first by Zahra and Harry, two other survivors from her neighborhood, Lauren begins to attract others to join their group traveling north. Eventually, their group, which has reached thirteen people, reach land that one of the group members, Bankole, owns in the northern part of California. They all start a settlement together, called Acorn, which centers around Earthseed, a religion that Lauren has been crafting for years and that everyone else in the group is interested in. 

There are many parts of Parable of the Sower which can be tied back to the 2008 financial crisis, as well as some of the key terms that we’ve been collecting and discussing over the semester. A huge part of Parable of the Sower is the consequences of increased inflation, and who it has affected. In Sower, inflation has made it so that innocent people and families are living with minimal water and supplies, or buying water from unsafe sources. This is an example of moral hazard, a term that was defined early in the semester as “the risk that an individual or organization will act irresponsibly or recklessly if protected or exempt from the consequences of an action.” (Dictionary.com). The government in Sower is more focused on how things are going with space travel than dealing with the well-being of the people. “Christopher Charles Morpeth Donner is our new President–President-elect. So what are we in for? Donner has already said that as soon as possible after his inauguration next year, he’ll begin to dismantle the “wasteful, pointless unnecessary” moon and Mars programs.” (Butler, 27). Because Donner is wealthy and privileged, he doesn’t have to worry about life on the streets and is willing to prioritize other issues first because it doesn’t affect him directly. This relates to the moral hazard which was present in the 2008 financial crisis. Members of the government and the upper 1% weren’t focused on helping those who were in poverty because the situation didn’t directly affect them. 

Something else which connects the events of Sower to the 2008 financial crisis is the idea of trust. According to our class definition, trust is “believing that a person will do what they say they will.” In the 2008 financial crisis, the subprime mortgage borrowers had trust in the companies that had given them the mortgages. Their trust ended up falling through, and they were led into debt because of the poor mortgages they had been given. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren has to have an insane amount of trust in those around her. Because of the unsafe situation that she’s living in, especially after the destruction of her gated community, she has to choose who to trust. There is always a huge risk for her trust to fall through since there are so many people with bad intentions. Like the at-risk borrowers who had put their trust in their lenders, Lauren had to put her trust in the people and environment around her. 

Throughout the semester, everything else we’ve read tied into the 2008 financial crisis, like Parable of the Sower tied into it. It was important to my understanding of the course and the 2008 financial crisis that I keep on top of the reading and coursework. Although there were some instances where I struggled with keeping up with the reading, I did my best throughout the semester to keep up with the reading and participate in the in-class discussions. I particularly found difficulty with The Turner House and found myself falling a bit behind the class schedule. As the Turner family was struggling with falling behind on payments on the family home and facing the threat of eviction, I was struggling with falling behind on my responsibility and facing a complete lack of understanding and success. While I did finish the book, it still demonstrated a low point in my semester when it came to my reading progress. After The Turner House, I gained the knowledge that it was worth it to take extra time to complete the reading so that I could adequately participate in the conversations and reading quizzes. 

By the time we reached Parable of the Sower, I had about ten weeks’ worth of experience in the class, and I fully understood the workload required to really succeed. Because of this, I kept on top of the reading for Parable of the Sower and kept the themes of the course in mind when reading. I was able to really find success, and I actually really enjoyed the book. I also found this success with A Mercy. King Lear and The Big Short were difficult for me to read, but I was still able to make it through them. It really wasn’t until A Mercy that I really realized how much easier the course was if I had an understanding of the reading. This contributed to my success in the semester and helped me to achieve my best work in the course. Overall, I feel that I experienced real growth throughout the semester in this course. There was space provided for me to learn the importance of keeping on track with the course, and also the importance of advocating for myself when I lack an understanding of something. There’s a good chance that I would have achieved success earlier in the semester if I had voiced my concern while we were reading King Lear or The Big Short. I learned that it’s important to speak up when I am struggling so that I can succeed and really have an opportunity to learn, instead of spending my energy trying to make it through books that I didn’t understand. 

In the 2008 financial crisis, subprime mortgage borrowers were suffering in silence. The subprime mortgage lenders never accepted blame as things began to go downhill and therefore kept the at-risk borrowers in the dark. Because of this, borrowers suffered in silence and often had no choice but to pin their issues on themselves and their own wrongdoings and poor credit, while, the whole time, the blame should have been pinned on the lenders. In this past semester, I let myself stay confused rather than stepping forward and asking for help when I needed it. Because of this, it seemed easier to tell myself that I didn’t understand the course, rather than tell myself that I needed to reach out and ask for help. As the borrowers needed only to learn more about their situation to shift the blame from themselves and realize that their hardship wasn’t their fault, it only took a moment of understanding for me to realize that I could have been successful throughout the whole semester if I had shifted the blame from myself and reached out for help. 

By: Spencer Jurgielewicz, December 13th of 2022

2008 saw one of the largest financial crises since the Great Depression in 1929.  It affected every nation on the planet and would result in short-term consequences of things such as high unemployment. Long-term issues, such as increased income and housing inequality, are still being felt to this day. Another effect that was seen from this crisis is seen in popular culture and various works of film and literature. This is an avenue which gives individuals the ability to express themselves and their views with directly or indirectly metaphors or messages. One such work is that of Parable of Sower by Hugo award recipient Octavia E. Butler. This dystopian novel set in the not-so-far-future features many comparisons and similarities to what we are witnessing and have witnessed in our lifetimes in the United States and even around the world. This allows writers, like Butler, to empower readers and bring awareness to a cause which may not be receiving as much attention or even to bring more attention to an ongoing issue. Butler’s novel draws many similarities from the 2008 Global Market Crash with countless examples and samples. I personally have seen and even have been affected by said issues which occurred back in 2008.  

The 2007/2008 Global Market Crash was something that was decades in the making and simply not something that happened overnight (Singh, 2022). It would be an oversimplification to blankly proclaim “oh the housing crisis happened because too many people bought houses and couldn’t pay for them”. This would be almost like stating “The Second World War occurred because Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939”. While both of these proclamations might yield some truth, both contain years and even decades of context which might be alien to the average person and if left out would be missing a bigger picture. While the housing market issue could arguably begin its origins with something like the deregulation movements under the Reagan administration and the formation of what we perceive as the modern Republican Party, the major effects began to occur in 2006 with housing prices beginning to fall then (Singh, 2022). The following year subprime lenders had started to file for bankruptcy (Singh, 2022). A subprime lender is a credit provider that specializes in borrowers with low or what is called “subprime” credit ratings, or a review of your credit and borrowing history ( Fernando, 2021). As a result these borrowers represent a higher risk of default or not being able to fully repay the loan (Fernando, 2021). So these subprime loans are associated with relatively high rates of interest and considered risky (Fernando, 2021). 

The series of subprime lenders filing for bankruptcy in 2007 was a massive red flag yet ignored or seen as “low risk” by lawmakers on Capitol Hill and many financial advisors. Later that year two massive hedge funds collapsed largely due to subprime loans not being repaid. A hedge fund is a method of investing in which managers use borrowed money, and other non-traditional assets, in order to beat regular investment returns for clients (Investopedia Team, 2022). By September this issue got so bad that the U.S. saw its largest bankruptcy ever with the collapse of the financial services company Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. in September of 2007 (Singh, 2022). By this point there was no turning back and the bubble would burst. Holdings with some worth trillions of dollars, were worthless investments in subprime mortgages (Singh, 2022). What would follow would be one of the worst economic crises since the 1930’s and see millions affected. Income inequality, especially among people of color and women, would increase which left these groups at an even greater disadvantage. While disheartening it would give a unique opportunity to present it in a manner in which they could advocate for assistance and a change in policy. This would include literature, film, and other similar media means. 

While many works of literature outline the previous statement one such strong example is that of Parable of Sower by Octavia Butler. The novel follows a character by the name of Lauren Oya Olamina and begins in 2024 right outside Los Angeles. The United States has been ravaged by climate change disasters, wealth inequality, and social issues. She lives in a gated community which separates itself from the numerous homeless and less fortunate individuals outside its walls. Lauren’s father is a Baptist pastor and attempts to hold the community together with faith and charity but many sadly like her mother, abused drugs which had negative consequences on Lauren. The United States at this point has elected the psuedo-fascist President Donner who loosens labor protection and advocacy for private, foreign investors who begin a sort of “debt slavery” among the population. Lauren becomes interested in a new religion called “Earthseed” . It highlights how God is Change and humanity must shape God in order to save itself from disorder and extinction. Lauren’s brother Keith becomes disenfranchised by their status quo and leaves the gated community to join a group of anarcho-thieves and sadly is killed. At this point her father attempts to leave the city walls and sadly is assumed to be killed while outside. By 2027 the federalist system collapses in the U.S. while individual states and cities enforce strict border securities on their own. Her community is overrun by outsiders looking for resources.  She escapes but due to fear of an increase in sexual assault dresses as a man and travels away with two fellow survivors. She marries and sets up the first Earthseed community named Acorn, in northern California and hopes that humanity can prosper on another planet and throughout the solar system. The novel deals with themes of drugs, greed, socio-economic collapse, women’s rights, and interracial marriage rights.  

While this novel describes an extreme “worst case scenario” for the future of the United States it would be valid to say there do exist some parallels to our current state of affairs and that depicted in the novel. One theme touched upon was that of racism. Even in this reality race and judges based upon still exist. Early in the book Lauren discusses how she was discouraged to play with the White children and many White people were fearful of others so much so they would arm themselves (36, Butler). While this book was written in 1993 it still outlines problems we face today in America. There are dozens of examples within the media of mistreatment among individuals solely based upon race and even people resorting to violence as a justification for self-defense. This prejudice also extended to interracial couples. Lauren cites a time when two people of different races were caught and she feared violence would erupt due to it (85, Butler). Another rather similar parallel is the treatment of women. A large portion of the novel sees Lauren crossdress as a man in order to ensure her security. Society had become so lawless that a woman simply walking down the street was at risk of something such as assault. In our modern era we have seen women being taken advantage of especially by men in powerful positions. CEO’s and Wall Street tycoons took it upon themselves to use company time and money to hire escorts as seen in the film Inside Job. While this financial mismanagement was not the sole reason for the 2008 crash it was surely a factor. While examining the more financial aspect of the novel we see rather shocking similarities. The wealth gap is astonishing as depicted with the rich flying around in private helicopters and the lower-income individuals being bothered or even killed simply for being “poor” (245, Butler). We can see in our world how the homeless are often discriminated against and put down. If you take a city, such as New York, one would see citizens owning billions in assets yet a few city blocks away we might find dozens of homeless people begging for a bottle of water and some crackers to survive the day. The wealth gap has risen greatly since 1993 and is likely to continue. Outsourcing to foreign countries, increasing privatization, and increasing militarization of police do not help the “99%” as we see this all backfire for President Doner throughout the novel. 

Upon the completion of this novel and now the end of this English course I found many themes and concepts which I was able to relate to easily. For starters my family was directly affected by the market crash. My family owns a series of duck farms around the United States called Jurgielewicz Duck Farm. Many farms existed with the one on Long Island spearheaded by my paternal side. Unfortunately due to numerous factors including financial issues going back to the 1980’s and 1990’s, the farm located here in New York collapsed and went bankrupt during the 2008 crash. This might go to show that even those in the “upper-middle or upper” classes were hit hard by this crisis and the only ones truly unaffected were the top 1% in this country. Now my family’s start goes back to the early 20th century upon their arrival in the United States. They opened a duck farm and by 1962 supplied 4.3 million ducks which is roughly half  of the entire nation’s duck supply at the time (Herbst, 1987). The business would shrink and by 1980 would produce only a million of the nation’s duck supply (Herbst, 1987). The final nail in the coffin was the 2008 market crash. Having such a sudden and a quick downturn of the U.S. economy, including a massive impact on imports and exports, saw too much strain on the business and it went out. From a personal anecdote my family struggled due to the massive downturn in assets. A change in lifestyle had occurred as my family moved as well to another part of Long Island. Such an adjustment was rather difficult to say the least but showcased to me, my family, and friends how events which took years in the making can and will disrupt the lives of unsuspecting individuals. Even 10+ years later I still feel personally affected by decisions made by CEO’s on Wall Street. I attended Geneseo College mostly due to the cheaper tuition rates which made it attractive to many students from Long Island especially. The cost of higher education is growing day by day and this will continue to influence people’s decisions for the years and decades to come. This could perhaps affect my children as well all from issues that stemmed from 2008. 

Events from 2008 still influence decisions made in this country and around the world. The “snowballing” of this crisis started as far as the 1980’s; however, in 2006 and 2007 a few key events took place which should have been seen as warning signs but were ignored. What would follow would be a massive economic downturn. Novels, such as Parable of Sower, hold messages and metaphors regarding how people were affected during and post-crisis. We can see direct comparisons between our world and that of the future world in the novel. Race, gender, privatization, greed, and collpase of authority were just a few things touched upon in this novel which bear rather scary similiarties to what we face now. In my own story I have witnessed the collapse of a food industrial empire. When I first took this course I did not expect to be able to draw connections between a science fiction novel set in the future and our own past. In reality we are inching closer to more economic downturn unless the proper measures are not taken to prevent another 2008

Citations 

Fernando, J. (2021, May 20). What does subprime lender mean? Investopedia. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subprimelender.asp 

Herbst, L. (1987, November 29). The ducks stop here no longer. The New York Times. Retrieved December 12, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/29/nyregion/the-ducks-stop-here-no-longer.html 

Singh, M. (2022, September 21). The 2007-2008 financial crisis in Review. Investopedia. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/financial-crisis-review.asp 

Team, T. I. (2022, October 25). What is a hedge fund? examples, types, and strategies. Investopedia. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedgefund.asp

During the 2008 housing crisis families were forced out of their homes. In order to even get a house you needed to have good credit and a stable job to get a mortgage. When the investors wanted to make more profit the lenders had to loosen their “standards” on who could get a mortgage. This allowed lenders to give out sub-prime mortgages to “people with poor credit” and unverified income to borrow money. They trusted the bankers when buying their house; in return, they were forced to leave everything behind. All because of the new lenders’ “requirements”, and low-interest rates which drove up housing prices. So that means the subprime mortgages would have to default (when a debtor cannot meet debt payment) because the person wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the mortgage anymore. To get a better understanding of the 2008 housing crisis the novel The Big Short sheds so light on the issues. The Salomon brothers “took giant pools of home loans and carved up the payments made by homeowners into pieces, called tranches. The buyer of the first tranche was like the owner of the ground floor in a flood. The buyer of the second tranche – the second story of the skyscraper – took the next wave in payments. The investor in the top floor of the building received the lowest rate of interest but had the greatest assurance that his investment wouldn’t end” (pg 7, Lewis, M. The Big Short). This means that the bank sold the mortgage to a “third party”.

In Parable of the Sower, Lauren and her family lived inside a wall to protect them from the outside world. It was hard to make enough money to support everyone but her family managed to do it. With the world in shambles, the government spent its money on sending astronauts into outer space. “All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter” (pg 17). During this book, there is a huge financial crisis. Not a lot of people can afford the amenities to live. But here is the government not doing anything about the global crisis. “After all, politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth, and order of the twentieth century” (pg 20). Ever since Lauren can remember politicians have been promising a return for civilization but, it yet has to happen. This is a great example of fraud. The government has claimed it wants to help the global communities but no action has been taken to help them. Money is a huge issue in communities behind the walls. If you want the police or even the fireman to come inside the walls it costs a fortune. “Most of our households couldn’t afford another big bill, anyway” (pg 32). It seems that not a single person can afford anything anymore. You have to scavenge for food and water if you aren’t lucky enough to grow your own food. This is a great example of a financial crisis because without food or water you’ll be dead in days. During this time people have to learn to protect themselves and their families inside and outside of the wall. The walls give them protection and hope that they can see another day but, it’s not always granted. “Someone shot Amy right through the metal gate” (pg 50). The wall is supposed to keep them safe but things keep happening near it. Things get thrown over the gate or left around it by the scavengers. This is toxic, some of the things they throw over are “ a maggoty dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child” (pg 50). It seems like these scavengers are trying to do anything to get these people disgusted enough to where they want them to leave their homes. These acts are also putting pressure on the community, they need to feel safe and secure and these vial acts aren’t doing that in fact it’s doing the opposite. “Our thieves paid us a visit last night” (pg 73). With everything that’s happening in the world, this is a huge global financial crisis. Everyone in the world, on the walls or out on the street is having a financial crisis. When it comes to Laurens’ area being robbed it seems to be liquidity. Somehow the robbers are getting easy access to jump over the wall to steal food for themselves. In this world, there is just a lot of corruption happening everywhere and there’s no way to stop it. 

During this crisis, there is a lot to worry about, your friends, family, loved ones, and yourself. It can be very difficult to stay together as a community, there is so much happening that can destroy a person’s perception on life. “We are coming apart. The community, the families, individual family members….We’re a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time” (pg 116). This global crisis is breaking down everyone’s spirits. When it comes to living in the walls you need money. Olivar is another walled-up town that needs to be bailed out by corporations. “A company called Kagimoto, Stamm, Frampton, and Company–KSF–has taken over the running of a small coastal city called Olivar” (pg 118). During the 2008  housing crisis banks needed to be saved by the U.S. government. The U.S. basically bailed them out of their money issues they were having and it seems that Olivar is getting the treatment. Later on in the book a big change occurred that turned everything upside down for everyone living in the walls. There was a break-in, someone smashed the front gate open, started burning houses down, and took everyone’s possession. “Last night, when I escaped from the neighborhood, it was burning. The houses, the trees, the people: Burning” (pg 151). Lauren’s house was destroyed by people wearing colors on their heads. “[B]ald people with painted heads, faces, and hands. Red faces; blue faces; green faces” (pg 154). Everyone’s possession are now gone because of the scavengers. Everyone in that community lost everything and some tragically lost their own lives. This comes back to the 2008 housing crisis, Octavia E. Butler wrote a story that shares information about a global financial crisis, housing crisis, foreclosure crisis, and subprime mortgage crisis. This can be compared to the housing market crash, everything that these families owned are gone. Their house, valuables, and even their own lives are all gone. Nothing can be restored and the only people they have to blame are the scavengers who can be related to Wall Street, everyone is just trying to survive. Accountability has been taken for some of the intruders but the rest stole what they could carry and left. This leaves Laurens’ community in corruption and they will not be able to come back from it.

At the beginning of this class, I didn’t understand what the 2008 housing crisis was. Now I understand it happened because of Wall Street and third-party bankers. Banks would give out mortgages to anyone that wanted one no matter what, even if they couldn’t afford it they were given one. If they couldn’t pay their mortgage the loan would default and be given back to the bank. The 2008 housing crisis affected many families in the United States. Many lost their homes because of careless businessmen wanting to make extra money. During the crisis, I was only about six years old at the time so I have no memory or recollection of this happening. Thankfully both my grandparents and parents weren’t severely affected by this. My grandparents still own the houses they built and my parents lived with them at the time so thankfully we weren’t affected either. We had trust as a family that if something were to happen we would be there for one another. It was like we were in our own bubble, we didn’t get touched during the housing crisis which was surprising, for other families though they weren’t so lucky. I think learning about the housing crisis before college would have been more beneficial for me because it is still hard to understand everything that went on behind those “closed doors” of Wall Street. It also doesn’t help that no one wants to take responsibility for their actions which to me is aggravating.  I believe that when it comes to buying a house in the housing market you should have some knowledge about what goes on and what you are expected to do. It could help you in the long run, also look at the fine print in the contracts you are signing it could have some “unspoken rules” that you might not know about. Change is inevitable it will happen anytime and anywhere so you need to be ready for it. Take precautions if you have to. Learning about this 2008 crisis was an eye-opener for me. I never expected something like this to happen. I cannot imagine being told to pack up my belongings and leaving all because of a bad investment. Learning to change is the best thing to do in this case. Learning can grow a great change in perspective and instead of thinking of the bad parts, focus on the good parts. Yes, you lost your house which is horrible but, you still have your family, everyone is in good health, and now moving forward will make you stronger than you ever thought you could be. In the end, never give up, push forward and you might just surprise yourself with how strong you can be.