Overextended Credit
It’s 12:53 PM, as I write this, sitting here in my local Starbucks, just around the corner from my home in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. I’m looking out the window, watching the traffic cop on the corner of 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, the traffic cop whom I see regularly in this Starbucks on her break. I see a group of FedEx delivery men, fighting the October wind off the Hudson River, loading their truck. Cab drivers, bus drivers, tourists, business men and women walking down the street, all currently most likely oblivious that their elected officials in the U.S. House of Representatives are right now debating whether or not to vote for a bill that will effectively allocate $700+ billion of their tax dollars to not end the financial crisis confronting them, but to tourniquet the hemorrhaging of the markets. And I am sad that more than likely, they have no idea what is happening, or what it means to them. And I am angry that, regardless of the outcome, the media will misinterpret it for them, the presidential candidates and their surrogates will spin their actions to make them appear omnipotent, taking more credit than deserved, far more credit for the bill’s certain successful passage than the average man has left on all his credit cards.