So, there I was, reading about the mortgage-credit crisis for the ka-trillionth time, thinking rancorously: Who are these people who got us in this freaking mess? Why didn't it occur to them that the banks were dangling fool's gold in front of them? You could maybe understand naïve, hopeful American dreamers getting sucked in, but what about all those educated, white collar jerks who took out jumbo mortgages with five-year ARMs, and then HELOC-ed themselves to the hilt to finance remodeled kitchens with Subzero refrigerators and soapstone counter-tops? What's their rebuttal?

Then, as I gazed wistfully about my crappy, ghetto house, where I recently relocated with my two young children ever since I had to sell my beautiful, freshly gut-renovated brownstone in a nice neighborhood before the bank foreclosed on it — because there was no way, given my place in the national financial fiasco, that I was going to be able to afford the jumbo mortgage monthly payments — it came to me, as in the final scene of the 1987 thriller Angel Heart: I am those people.

And now for the denouement: There's a fair chance that you might be, too. See if the following scenario sounds familiar.

You grew up in the 1970s and 80s, watching Saturday Morning Cartoons, Brady Bunch re-runs and playing with Star Wars and Transformers action figures or Strawberry Shortcake and My Pretty Pony dolls. Your parents got divorced, and when your Mom went to work, she gave you the house keys so that you could let yourself in after school. You helped yourself to snacks like Top Ramen noodles and a stack of Pringles while you watched ABC After School Specials like My Dad lives in a Downtown Hotel and The Boy Who Drank Too Much. When your Mom came home, she was too tired to cook, so it was either TV dinners at home or stuffed potato skins at Houlihans. You saw your Dad every other weekend, and after he bought you more Star Wars stuff, sometimes he'd take you to his single-guy apartment, which looked like the last day of a Macy's clearance sale. Lunch? Bennigans.

Cut to: you, having a solid career (which you did your own way, without towing the line for anyone), getting married much later than your parents did (their first time, anyway), and having your first baby. Nothing in your life prepared you for how utterly white-light an experience holding that newborn would be. If nothing had ever been all that clear in your life, it was now: You'd do anything for this creature. By now, it was the late 1990s, early 2000s, and maybe you'd gotten at least a little whupped by the NASDAQ crash, or more than a little by the downturn post-9/11. You were freaking: you needed stability, solid ground. You had children.

Then, interest rates dipped, enticing mortgages were unveiled, and the solution materialized like a fairy godmother: a home! Not the psycho-spiritual SRO of your childhood, but a homey home. You'd invest yourself, your money, your family's financial future — your whole idea of family-ness — in it. You jumped in, head first. You'd always been so self-reliant, so wary of easy schemes that you didn't see at the time that you were getting in over your head.

This narrative may be kind of harsh and exaggerated, but if any angle in its arc resembles your own, the good news is that you are not alone: You're a member of Generation X — or at least you act like one, owing to peer influence and life experiences (right, President-Elect Obama?). The bad news is that you, I, and the rest of us may be more responsible for this mortgage meltdown than we'd imagined.

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