I was listening to the radio a few weeks ago and heard an advertisement for a credit-counseling service scam. Part of the ad’s narration covered all the money problems and woes “you” (the listener) might have. One of them was
- “Your credit cards got maxed out.”
Read that line carefully. If you remember your grammar lessons, you might see that it’s written in what linguists call the “passive voice”, which emphasizes that something happened instead of saying I or you or he or she or we or they actually did something. That’s the classic argument against using the passive voice. It evades responsibility. In the active voice, the subject does whatever is being done. In the passive voice, something is done to the subject by someone (or something) else, who may be unnamed. It may seem as if no one did anything; the thing just happened.
The car was washed yesterday. (Who washed the car isn’t stated.) Mistakes were made. (We’re not saying who made the mistakes.) Be gone, before a house drops on you! (We don’t know who is dropping houses.) So you see the way it works: These things … just … happen.
Suppose I were writing an ad for a credit-counseling agency. This ad is supposed to convince people who can’t pay their credit-card bills to pay this agency to help get them out of their credit-card debt. One thing the agency might do is contact the credit-card issuers and negotiate lower interest rates (which you can do yourself; you don’t need to pay someone to do that for you). If all that were true, I suppose would use the passive voice too: “Your credit cards got maxed out.”
But I’m not writing an ad for a credit-counseling business. I’m reacting to one.
So I have to ask: Is that really what happened to you if you’re in over your head in credit-card debt? The credit cards got maxed out? Just like that? Like a flat tire or a rainy day? It just happened?
That’s the wrong way to think about it.
What really happened?
If you’re drowning in credit-card debt, the cards didn’t just get maxed out. The credit-card debt is there because you charged too much on your credit cards. You bought too many things. You spent too much money. You let things get out of control. You put yourself in a position where compound interest is working against you instead of working for you. You have to understand this. The sooner you realize that you did this to yourself, the sooner you can get started fixing it and returning to financial sanity.
