Originally Posted by
Artkansas
I agree, to some extent, Darren created his own problems. But he did it by doing what others did and what much advertising was devoted to convincing him to do. Drive till you qualify, and BIG REBATE! Darren, not being a scholar didn't see beyond the surface. He wasn't sufficiently critical to see that land couldn't keep going up or understand the real estate bubble. That Cavalier of his was one of the classic cheap and expendable cars, there aren't many of them left and his may have been on it's last legs and needed replacement. Big rebates on the Mitsubishi made him think he was getting a deal. He was, but he still owed on the entire amount, and I bet he didn't use the rebate to pay down the loan. He didn't use critical thinking to realize that we've been running out of oil for a long time and that low oil prices were supported by non-ending wars.
You are correct that his problems are not the big ones, but they are symptomatic of the big ones. He was just one more pawn in the Loan Bubble created by Wall Street. In other times he might not have qualified for a loan at all. He was a fellow who tried to maintain his lifestyle by credit when his income was slipping, a common strategy. He got suckered into getting a fuel swilling pig of a car, but he didn't get the connection between fuel prices and war. Media never crossed the t and dotted the i for him; a media owned by the big money and representing big money's interests. Then he lost his job, and coped as well as he could by working where he could find it.
So Darren and his car make the cut for me, because his problems are our problems. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "As are we all."
I don't totally disagree, but I don't totally agree with you either. The problem with buying into your argument totally is that it essentially turns Darren (is his name Darren or Daryl?) into a brain-damaged child, completely manipulated by the puppet masters on Wall Street and Madison Avenue, incapable of making choices, incapable of processing information. A mindless creature without values, intellect or judgment.
I can't buy that. Yes - we're all bombarded by messages all the time. Conflicting messages. We - including Darren - pick and choose which ones we decide to accept, which ones we'll reject. Just because someone is trying to sell us something doesn't mean we have to buy it.
You present Darren as a helpless victim. Yet your second paragraph lists a set of CHOICES that he made, with his eyes open. It doesn't describe coercion. When people in my generation were drafted, there was no choice about it - we either went to war, to jail, or to Canada. When an African American was denied housing or employment because of his race, he didn't choose for that to happen. When a plant that employed half the workers in a town shut down and moved the work to Mexico or China, those workers had no choice about that. These people were victims. Darren, if he was a victim of anything, was a victim of his own avarice.
Darren was subjected to aggressive marketing, but in the end, he made his choices and has to live with the consequences. Do I feel bad that he was convinced that he could have more than he really could afford, and that now he may lose what he probably never should have had anyway? Sure - I don't like to see anyone suffer. But I can't feel the same kind of outrage that you do. At the risk of sounding really callous, I'll point out that, in a sane world, he never would have had even a couple of years of that nice life.