Being Human

It's been six days and still, whenever I read about the Boston Marathon or see one of those jarring photographs, it feels like I've just been socked in the chest. And I can't get the images out of my head, so every so often I find myself clutching at something for support before I realize that I've just been socked in the chest again.

I almost ran the Boston Marathon, qualifying four years ago, and again three years ago, each time injuring my knee in the final stages of training. But that is not why I feel such intense empathy with the runners whose legs were blown off in the explosions. It is not because I am a runner that these images make me cringe in horror. No, it's just because I'm human.

The Boston Marathon jacket I have never worn and never will.

You know who else is human? The bombers. Well, one of them, anyway. The other is a former-human, and mostly I don't care about that, until it occurs to me that I am just as much like them as I am like the victims. We are all humans. We can call the bombers "monsters" or "mentally deranged" or even "evil," but that doesn't change the fact that in virtually every respect, they are almost exactly like me. No, I've never killed anyone before, and am confident that I will continue to resist the impulse to do so for the rest of my life. And I'm just as confident that almost every one of us is able to exercise the same restraint. Most of us just don't go around killing people. But some of us do.

And a great many of us commit other (obviously far less extreme and violent and horrible) acts on a pretty much day to day basis, that, while not causing people to die, do cause other humans a great deal of suffering and misery. Take me, for instance.

I spent the last 15 years as a collections attorney, and I was good at it. During that 15 years, I filed thousands of lawsuits, which, frankly, I did not look at very closely. There was no time for that, because of the thousands of motions for default judgment, and the thousands of wage garnishments and bank garnishments and executions that I was also filing.

And every one of those documents was a part of a process that caused other people suffering and misery.  I've helped to ruin a lot of lives, in other words. The process, in its simplest sense, involved taking money away from poor people and giving it to rich people ("people" who's names generally ended in 'Inc.'). And there are thousands of other collections attorneys doing pretty much the same thing every day. And these attorneys have large support staffs, and the agencies and firms for whom they work employ thousands of people, and the clients for whom they are collecting employ thousands more, all working toward the same end -- to take money away from poor people and give it to rich people.

Rows and rows of cubicles, filling collections agencies all over the country, are staffed with "customer service representatives" (yes that is what they call them, but from now on I will call the "collectors," which is far more accurate), wearing headsets attached to phones that automatically dial the phones of  poor people all day long, and ask them for money, often not very politely, and often knowing quite well that these people have no money to pay. But it's their job. And it is a full-time job. They do it for eight hours a day, five days a week. And the more money they can collect for their clients, the more money they make, in the form of "commission" or "bonuses." They are highly motivated, and do not like taking no for an answer.

Computer professionals work diligently to improve software that will allow court documents to be filed more quickly and more efficiently, so that even more lawsuits and judgments and garnishments can be filed against even more people, with increasingly less human oversight, which, let's face it, is expensive.

It is all done legally, of course (well, mostly). The process is made easier by judges who spend no more time reviewing the documents than the lawyers did. Increasingly, the documents are not even signed, but filed electronically. It's possible for them to be filed with no human actually looking at them at all!

It can all be justified, of course. We humans can justify anything. "They do owe the money, after all." "They can always hire their own attorney and dispute the lawsuit." (While I cannot count the number of lawsuits I filed, I can count the number of trials I had: one.) "If only they'd exercised more personal responsibility, they wouldn't be in this situation." All true, in a way.

I have seen close-up the misery I helped cause. I have seen the faces of the people whose lives I helped to ruin. Some of them are angry, some are just very sad. Most are confused and have no idea what is happening to them. Many have simply given up and drift about like ghosts ("dead souls" Chekhov might call them).

How many lives I  have I helped to ruin? I have no idea. Too many to count. I am aware of one who committed suicide, but that can be justified too. My client wasn't her only creditor, after all. And besides, she must have really depressed, even before I sued her and garnished her bank account and the attorney for the mortgage company foreclosed on her house.

I am only picking on the collection industry because it's what I know, and I said at the beginning that I was going to start with me. There are other industries that are just as good or even better at ruining peoples lives: drug companies, insurance companies, mortgage companies, the auto industry, the gun industry,  for starters. Maybe the company you work for ruined a few lives today. I don't know.

We don't do it on purpose, necessarily, but we do it.Over and over and over again. Does this make us as bad as the bombers? Of course not, obviously. It's all just part of being human.