The ARM of Satan

Dear United States of America,

I have decided to ask you, the government for a bailout.

My bailout will be considerably less than the billions the auto industry is requesting.

My bailout will be considerably less than the trillions the financial industry is getting.

My bailout will be even less than most government pork programs.

I want one million dollars.

I figure if the financial industry can make the mistakes that they made and get trillions, then I can be honest about my own failures and get my million. I am not even asking for a plural: just a single million.

Granted I have too much credit debt and that is probably crimping my cash flow, but the truth is, I am too important to fail. If I don’t pay off this debt then the financial institutions that I owe money to will have to fire people.

Granted I have a mortgage that has gone adjustable. I knew that was going to happen, but if the economy hadn’t tanked then I wouldn’t be in the position of having to owe much more than I planned in the first place. Sure that isn’t “responsible” in the long term, but isn’t the pride of home ownership worth it?

If I have to give up my house, my family will be homeless and a drain on the social programs of the state and the tenant that rents part of the house will be in the same boat.

You see? I am too big to fail.

mortgage.jpgI know that I am asking for a lot more than what it will take to “really” bail me out. Let’s think about this, though. I am only asking $.30 per taxpayer. I know that they didn’t do anything wrong and there are probably those who are in the same state that I am in, but my life is a priority!

Why should I have to make sacrifices in order to patch up my own mistakes?

Why should I have to change the way that I am running my house and my life in order to make ends meet?

Why should I have to change my behavior in order to do the right thing when for less than the price of a stamp I can succeed and continue in the behavior that got me here in the first place?

How many times have I listened to the temptation of the easy way out?

How many times have I thought that the short-term gain would be much better than the long-term price that I would have to pay because I could always make reparations in order to prevent the long-term effects from occurring. I could always prevent the worst from happening by getting by on more short-term solutions.

Hence the temptation of sin.

Take the easy way now! It’ll feel so good! Don’t worry about the consequences, we will fix those before they happen and then what we can do if they come about is spread the burden around so you don’t look as bad!

The price of fruit on a tree never looked so low.

The price of fruit on a tree never looked so good.

It is time that we got honest with ourselves in this era of financial decadence, especially at this season of materialism and consumerism — the celebration of a birth of the salvation of our souls at the price of our souls themselves.

Can we be just a little more responsible and take the consequences for our actions and repair the behavior so that we don’t fall into this mess again?

Maybe it is time we started to save, not to buy everything in the technology department attempting to make our lives easier by finding new ways to figure out how much debt we are in.

Maybe we need to invest in fruit that does not go bad, that does not lead to stress, ruin, and mishap. After all, sitting down to have a real conversation doesn’t require a payment plan.

Praying on fifty-four beads with your family isn’t nearly as cutting-edge as watching a fifty-four inch screen.

Placating our boredom with the latest phone that can do everything might not leave us with a soul that can do anything, and we may end up communicating less because of the phone that we bought to communicate better in the first place.

I know that this soul searching is pointing me in the way of reparations and penance, but it would be so much easier just to spread it around.

So what do you say about that million?

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