I just watched last night’s Daily Show episode, where Jon Stewart takes it pretty badly to Jim Cramer (who was to me, until very recently, just that crazy guy on that one CNBC show).  But the entire episode felt like relief – like Jon Stewart was venting for all of us who don’t understand why we as taxpayers are being stuck with these huge bills for a crisis that we didn’t create.

Or did we?  We recently took out what I consider to be a very reasonable mortgage and Wells Fargo (our bank and mortgage lender) did a pretty exhaustive check of our financial standing.

But, if several years ago, a bank had come to us and told us we could get into a house we really liked with a bad loan, would we have known it was a bad loan?  I’m sure there are people who game the system, but I’d suspect that the majority of average Americans wouldn’t understand that a particular mortgage is unrealistic until it’s too late.

Regardless, the damage is done, and something has to happen.  The American banking system is too important to fail so either the government has to pump a lot of money into the system to keep them afloat or house prices will have to make a dramatic and sudden rebound.  Or the government will keep stuffing smaller amounts of money into the system until housing prices rebound.  Assuming they ever reach the levels before the crisis within a reasonable amount of time, which is not a small assumption.

I’ll stop here, because I don’t want to seem like an expert on what’s going on, but I’d urge anybody who has a few hours and wants to understand what’s going on to check out these three This American Life episodes, which do a great job of spelling out the causes and consequences of the crisis in a way that didn’t require any economics classes:

You can listen to all of them for free online and I felt a lot better afterwards, knowing that I at least can understand the basics of one of the largest and scariest things to ever happen to our world in my lifetime.  This financial crisis is a bit like diabetes; it’s not something that affects my day-to-day life yet, but I know that any day I could wake up and find that things are no longer fine.

If I got diabetes and lost my house and job?  That’d be the worst.