Bankruptcy

Desperate Debtors? Doesn’t Have To Be Like This

Score another one for the moral supremecists who’ve successfully made bankruptcy a four-letter word and something to be so ashamed of that suicide by police fire seems preferable. Out of Lawrence, Kansas comes this excruciatingly tragic story: Marsha Mace, a waitress overtaken by financial difficulties who was involved in a standoff with local police that ended violently, and sadly, with her own death.

The article itself is sad, but unremarkable, except for the disclosure of the deceased woman’s financial difficulties and pending bankruptcy case. There is no proof that the woman’s bankruptcy case was a motive in any decision to provoke policemen into killing her - indeed, there’s no proof that was her intent at all that’s disclosed, save for vague references to a note of some kind.
But as the comments left by presumably local readers of this newspaper’s website make clear, the disclosure of Ms. Mace’s financial state was and remains highly controversial. Most of the comments mentioning that disclosure express emotions ranging from disgust to frustration to outrage over the concept of disclosing a deceased person’s financial difficulties.

I submit that the reason this is so distasteful is the successful campaign by certain individuals and groups (I’m looking at you, Professor Todd Zywicki, and you know why) to bring back the modern psychological equivalent of the debtor’s prison - the perception of bankruptcy as something shameful. I further submit that in this day and age of triple-digit interest rates from predatory payday lenders, BARF, meaningless (and untimely) debt “counseling,” the ownership of personal information not by the person but by the credit bureaus that collect and sell (and lose!) that information, “tort reform” coupled with jacked-up medical costs, a whack economy in which the rich get obscenely rich and everyone else gets battered - pardon me, but a consumer who stumbles in this day and age deserves a supportive round of applause for a valiant effort and a hand up, not a hand slap.

I didn’t know Ms. Mace. I don’t know what kind of person she was, and I am decidedly not endorsing firing on police in an effort to have them hurt oneself (as she is alleged to have done). What I do know “for sure,” as Oprah says, is that bankruptcy doesn’t have to be seen as some shameful last act of the desperate. For many debtors, it’s the first positive move towards strength and health that many have been able to make in years. For all debtors, it’s supposed to be a fresh start. It’s time we started bringing that hope back to the bankruptcy process and stopped looking down on those who choose bankruptcy protection over a futile attempt to shovel their way out of a sand pit with a teaspoon.

© 2006 SC Bankruptcy & Consumer Law Blog.