Did I ever tell you that I once worked at Carmax? Well, I did. This was in the period after I left the National Park Service and while I was working on a master's degree so I could teach high school history.
I bring it up because one of the duties of a salesperson at Carmax is to take and submit loan applications for people who would like to buy a car. By federal law, car dealers and others cannot refuse to take a loan application and submit it to lending institutions. That doesn't mean anyone will offer credit to the applicant, however. Two stories have stuck in my mind ever since then.
One night I answered a phone call from a woman who wanted to apply for a car loan, and started to take her information. While listening to her, I could hear the voices of small children crying and quarreling in the background. As we went through the process of filling in the form I learned that she worked in a chicken processing plant - that is to say a slaughterhouse - cutting up chicken carcasses all day. She had four children but no spouse, and her income clearly was inadequate to get a car loan. I knew that by the time I was halfway through the process, but had to complete the loan application anyway. I thought to myself, if there's a hell, this woman is in it. She was heavily in debt, her income didn't yield her any way to escape the financial quicksand she was in, and there was no hope for any improvement in her situation, at least until her children were grown and on their own. Cutting up recently deceased chickens for the next twenty years at least would be her fate, not even a car to drive on weekends to relieve the tedium of her life.
Of course, all the banks turned her down, and I had to call her back to tell her there was no way she could qualify for a loan.
The other occasion concerned a man who came in to the dealership with his pregnant wife and baby in a carriage. While the woman excused herself to look at cars in the showroom, he told me he had a six year old Saturn he had bought two years previously at a roadside used car dealership. He was still making payments on the car. He showed me the paperwork, and I noticed he was paying interest at 29%. His car had about 100,000 miles on it when he bought it. Because his mother was ill in Atlanta, he had made a number of trips there to see her, and had put 30,000 more miles on the car. Now it was becoming unreliable.
Carmax adverrtises that they buy cars, even from people who don't buy from them, so I had one of the appraisers look at his Saturn. You won't be surprised to learn that the trade-in value on a Saturn with 130,000 miles is not very high. In fact, because of the interest rate he was paying, he still owed more on it than it was worth. Once again, I had to tell him there was no way he could qualify for a loan or buy a car from Carmax. He left with his wife and daughter, disappointed.
I've told these stories to illustrate a point. I don't believe much in an afterlife, but I think we live in our own version of heaven or hell right here on earth. We make our own lives, but sometimes we have hell inflicted on us, by our own poor decisions, or by blind fate.
So, given these two stories, I get truly exasperated with the mentality of "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and everyone else should be able to. Nobody made it easy for me, so I don't know why I should have to make things easy for anyone else."
I'm glad such people have prospered, and I hope they're happy. But let's have some pity on folks like the two I've just told you about. We can alleviate the hell our fellow humans suffer in, and I think we must all try to do so.
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