I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m an American. Born and raised.

I’ve been watching the “credit crisis” unfold on the news over the past few weeks and I can’t help but laugh at how dense, jaded, and arrogant people are being about the whole situation. Everyone seems to be looking for people or a bank or a company to blame. Well, folks, I hate to be the one to break it to you but this is all your own damn faults.

Yes, that’s right – you. You, the ones who bought houses, cars, and expensive electronics that you knew you would never be able to pay for. You, the ones who maxed out as many credit cards as your banks would give you. You, the ones who ignored bargains and sales and coupons and budgets. You.

There’s nobody else to blame for this. It’s not really Bush’s fault, even though he’s an idiot. It’s not really Bernanke’s fault, even though he’s a wuss. It’s not really the fault of any of the big corporate bank CEOs or the Wall Street investors, douchebags though they may be. No, this is most certainly a problem created and perpetuated by the American public.

Why, you ask? It’s simple. You took the stupid loans without doing some basic research on what an ARM is and why it’s a bad idea. You maxed out the credit cards without crunching the numbers on how long they’d take to pay back. You allowed politicians in Washington DC to sit back while the Republicans dragged us into a pair of absolutely useless, fruitless wars. It was all you.

But, like you always do, you find ourselves a couple of good scapegoats. We’re Americans – that’s what we fucking do! It’s not our fault that we’re idiots. It’s not our fault that ours kids are going to be even bigger idiots when they grow up. It’s not our fault that we’re fat and lazy and incapable of coexisting with the rest of the modern world. No, those aren’t our problems.

Give me a break!

Enough is enough. This has to end before we do. We’re coming up on perhaps the second most important presidential election in United States history. Go out and vote. I don’t care who you vote for, although I’d guess that you’re going to vote for Obama because you’re reading this, which means you’re capable, which means that you have a brain. Just vote. We cannot just sit around and wait for the fuse to burn all the way down. We have to take action now, before we pass the point of no return.