Fresh Start

I am trying to understand how Spain has managed with double digit unemployment for decades while here in the U.S. we approach 10% and the sky falls.

While I am personally immune, bombproofed, and on high ground vis-a-vis our recession, many around me are not. But one thing that every unemployed person I know has to keep up in a bad or good economy is a motor vehicle...something that not every Spaniard has to deal with.

This point isn't widely appreciated. Paul Blanco's Chevrolet's FreshStart credit program advertised on the radio yesterday and said, "You need a car." No matter how much debt you currently carry, "You need a car." Bad credit? No credit? "You need a car."

And you, the radio listener, deserve a car. Even if you've fucked over every other lender in the past, you deserve a fresh start

because without you buying sixteen million cars a year our economy falls apart.

No shit. My unemployed cousin still has his car...not to drive to interviews, he gave up looking for a job long ago. No, his car is used daily to get to the store, to buy his malt liquor, and to get his second DUI...come on, what American is going to walk? Certainly not the unemployed. And certainly not anyone who bought a "home" in some suburban landscraper two miles from the nearest supermarket (because neighborhood markets are illegal) and five miles from every other service.

So to live in America, the greatest nation in the world that somehow can't seem to culturally manage even a small economic downturn, car ownership is mandatory. Mandatory maintaining, gassing, and registering all come with citizenship. This isn't something most 24 year old Cordobans have to deal with, because they aren't forced to own a car just to live. Unemployment, while never pleasant, is at least easier managed without the specter of a car payment every thirty days.

Here in Elk Grove, every unemployed soul would be forced, absolutely forced, to own at least one vehicle to even get to the unemployment office, let alone to manage the daily tasks of living. So I say fuck 'em -- a large portion of their economic plight is self-created -- they chose to live in such arrangements.