Pants, by definition, are: an outer garment covering the body from the waist to the ankle, with a separate part for each leg. One cannot have one pant, although I suppose if one has only one leg and removes the extra part, one might have a pant? My dashboard dictionary…
For the past couple years, I have had the privilege of working as a consumer attorney. I’ve occasionally written about some of the topics I’ve encountered as a consumer lawyer. In this post, I’ll address another issue that I commonly encounter in my practice: illegible forms full of fine print that deprive consumers of fundamental rights.
What provoked this topic is a lawsuit I am currently handling. My client sued a payday lender based on a payday loan that she alleges the defendant repeatedly processed and renewed in violation of the payday lending laws of Missouri. This is a big deal to my client and to all of the numerous potential class members of this class action. Why is it important? For starters, this particular payday lender (and many others) charged 469% interest. This is not a typo. I have often asked friends and acquaintances whether they’ve heard of payday loans. They usually say they have heard of those sorts of businesses. I then ask them how much interest they think payday lenders charge. Most people say something like this:
“Oh, I hear that it is an exorbitant rate of interest, perhaps 25%.”
They are shocked to hear that it is legal to charge consumers 400 or 500% interest on a small consumer loans. They are shocked to hear that some of these companies make it part of their business plan to repeatedly violate Missouri lending laws. They are also shocked at one other thing, the topic of this post. …
As human animals, we are condemned to live with great ignorance in an unpredictably violent world. To compensate, most of us work hard to develop an extraordinary expertise to protect ourselves from considering our precarious existence. We work hard to pre-screen toxic thoughts. We rarely contemplate our own inevitable deaths, for example. We are often successful at protecting ourselves from real-life things that would terrify us if we dared to squarely consider them.
Once in a while, though, we get a terrifying glimpse of unvarnished reality. For instance, we sometimes suddenly realize that we are affixed to that Conveyor Belt of Life, a “belt” that inexorably moves us toward a time when we will be old if we’re lucky, then lifeless. Whenever this terrible thought brings shivers, we quickly change channels to consider something less macabre. Yet we are all strapped onto that Conveyor Belt, even our precious young children. In 150 years, everyone currently living on Earth will be dead. It is difficult to conjure up more disturbing thoughts.
What other toxic thoughts occur when our mental guard is down? How about the thought that we are not meaningfully different from each other. Or that the world is full of mobile intestinal tracts–walking talking intestinal tracts. Or that our bodies are rife with parasites. And that we are animals. Or that we are breathing, thinking meat, a point directly yet elegantly made by a touring entourage of corpses known as BodyWorlds. And here’s another toxic truth most of …
For those of you who waded through my post of last week about my day trekking through the federal bureaucracy on a quest for documents, I have two things to add. First, thanks for taking the time to wade. Second, I got an update from my friend. Remember those records…
Bill Clinton’s Commencement Speech at Harvard – June 6, 2007
The former President explained much societal dysfunction when he asked a simple question: Should we focus on what human beings have in common or should we obsess about their minor differences?
The outcome of this simple choice determines innumerable personal and political agendas. To the extent that we choose incorrectly, the resulting contentious rhetoric has the capacity to mushroom into oppression and violence that can displace, maim and kill millions of people. It has done so repeatedly.
Many of our political and moral disputes stem from this basic low-level perceptual choice: whether to focus on differences or commonalities. Here is how Clinton captured the issue:
So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent?
For at least six years, the air has been thick with violence, bigotry and oppression because too many people are making the wrong choice up front. The current Administration excels at choosing badly. The result? A de facto national policy that anyone who is different is suspicious.
As eloquently …