Some twenty years ago, when our kids were grown and my wife and I determined that our family had finally grown out of the hand-to-mouth stage, we decided that with a bit more hand-to-mouth sacrifice we could afford to splurge on buying a vacation property.
We bought a small lot near Wilmington, Illinois, about an hour from Chicago, nestled on the shore of a little spring-fed lake created from an abandoned coal strip-mine. And then we scraped together enough money to buy a 300-square-foot park model mobile home to put on it.
But while we prepared the lot for park model’s delivery, we heard disturbing rumors about the RV dealer that had sold us the mobile home. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy, we were told. And if we didn’t get the unit delivered to our lot right away, we could say goodbye to the money we had given them.
I started working the phones, and the following weekend a truck hauled the park model to our lot. I guided the driver to set it in place, and when he was finished he handed me a bill for delivery.
“No, I already paid the company for delivery,” I told him. I showed him my receipt of full payment for the park model, delivery, and several hundred more dollars to have the unit skirted to enclose plumbing and electrical lines.
He nodded grimly. “Yeah,” he said, “but I doubt I’m gonna get any money from them. They’re going bankrupt.”
I told him I had heard that rumor, too, which is why I had insisted the unit be delivered to a lot that wasn’t fully prepared for it.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I already gave them your delivery money. They also have the money I paid for skirting, and I probably won’t see that happen, either.”
In the end, we were both right. The driver got stiffed for his delivery, other than a small tip I gave him that might help cover his gas bill, but certainly not his time. I had to scrape together more money to pay for skirting, which I installed myself — but not until I also had to pay for plumbing damage because I couldn’t find the money or the time until after the first freeze.
Still, I felt lucky: because we had heard the rumors in time, we had our park model. Had I called a week later, that unit — and the money we paid for it — would have been seized as assets in the bankruptcy filing.
Over the next several years, we got occasional letters notifying us of our part in a class-action suit to recover funds from the bankruptcy filing. We laughed at each note, because when we read the full list of claimants named, we knew where the money would go.
And then we got the letter explaining the final disposition of the case: not a penny went to a truck driver, or a plumber, or a carpenter. The lawyers walked away with it all.
And the woman whose gambling debts drove her RV company into bankruptcy? She was now the owner of a new company, racing toward the same fate as her first business.
There are those who will tell you that Chapter 11 bankruptcy is a necessary part of American business, and that it is ultimately good for the economy.
There are those who will tell you that bankruptcy is a smart business tactic that can not only keep businessmen out of the poorhouse, but make them wealthy.
There are even some who will file for bankruptcy time after time after time — as many as six times — and then boast about how unbelievably wealthy they have become thanks to such smart business practices.
Although bankruptcy is a failure that should elicit remorse, there will be those who offer no apology to the victims: the truck driver, plumber, carpenter or purchaser who have all lost money. There will be no penitence, no shame for taking from others what they could not afford to give.
Instead, there will be boasting puffery that those many bankruptcies were a sign of business tactical genius, and insistence that Americans should elect them to the highest office in the land so they can use their financial acumen to make the nation great.
Well, if you’ve ever seen your own money plundered by someone else’s bankruptcy, as my wife and I have, only to watch that unprincipled charlatan go on to victimize still others through the same heartless tactic, you may have some idea of how we intend to vote this November.
It is said that all politics is personal. When a politician’s words fall out of the clouds of abstract thought and land — plunk — in your actual living room, reeking of cruel, heartless hypocrisy, that is when politics comes home to you.
And then when you’ve sat in your living room and watched that same politician on TV ridicule and mimic a disabled person — and then you have seen the hurt look on the face of your disabled wife, as I have — you know without question how you’re going to vote.
Because there is only one candidate this year whose soul is so bankrupt that I don’t even have to say his name for you to know who it is.
If you plan to vote for him, I am happy for you personally, because it means you have never been the victim of a serial bankrupter whose calculated business practices enrich only his own life at the expense of yours.
And I am happy for you because it means you or someone you love are not the disabled ones being humiliated by his cruel, juvenile impersonations.
But if he dupes enough Americans like you into voting for him, then the pain-filled aftermath of his soulless intemperance will inevitably land — plunk — in your own living room.
And you will have only yourself to blame for not seeing it coming.
