Who Says You Can't be a Millionaire?

OK, so the million-dollar club may not be so easy to join, even in this age of diluted greenbacks, but it looks like many of us are now members of two new kinds of millionaire clubs:

• There are now more than ONE MILLION HOMES in the foreclosure pen.
  
• The watch list of US terror suspects now tops ONE MILLION!

If you or someone near and dear to you now belongs to either (or both!) clubs, you have my sympathy. And if you have a story to tell about the path that led there, I would love to hear it too!

Suffering in Suburbia

The evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) for the fatal flaws that underlie the suburban lifestyle continues to mount. Today brings another reminder, in the form of a business page lead-off in the Newspaper of Record, on the futility of building ever-larger abodes in ever-more distant locales:

Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise

The writer even flirts, briefly, with the idea that exurbs may begin to be abandoned the same way cities were in the second half of the 20th century. The irony of this "reverse flight" would be funny if the human and social costs of this upheaval were not so devastating.

Perhaps the ever-higher cost of gas can do for average citizens what years of traffic jams, pollution, resource wars, and unhealthy dependence on the auto could not achieve: make us think about the burden our lifestyles impose on this lifeboat called planet earth.