Capitalism will put the bill on your grave and harass your grieving family until they pay
One of my cousins passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35, and had been paying back a loan from the bank. About two weeks after his death, my great aunt received a statement from the bank (his mail was being delivered to her house) about a late payment. She called the bank and explained the situation and the only thing a manager could say was “Well, that’s unfortunate. We can arrange so payments will resume in 30 days, that should be enough time to have already paid for the other arrangements.”
On top of the unexpected $10,000 funeral, cremation and burial bill, my aunt had to finish paying my uncle’s $5,000 loan. She’s a disabled retiree, on a fixed income, and could barely afford to pay for her insulin for diabetes. She nearly lost her home of more than 40 years. Fuck the system.
She didn’t need to pay. When people die, their debts are not their family’s responsibility.
In fact, it is outright illegal to try and collect those debts from a person who didn’t cosign the loan and isn’t executing the will.
Banks count on people not knowing that last comment so that they can still get money
They really do.
My great-grandmother had her identity stolen before she died at the age of 93, and thousands of charges were racked up on credit cards in her name. After she passed away, they called my mother to try and collect. My mom laughed at them, and told them: “She’s dead, good luck collecting.” The credit card asked my mother, “Don’t you want to clear your grandmother’s debts? Don’t you want to clear her good name?” My mom laughed at them again. “No,” she said. “Because a 90 year old wasn’t watching porn with those credit cards, and her name is fine. Don’t give credit cards to old women likely to pass away soon. This is on you.”
Which is how I learned as a young child to always question collection agents, and to never pay off debts that aren’t your own. They often can’t even collect that money from the estate, if there is one, depending on how you write your will and what kind of account the money was kept in.
DO NOT EVER PAY OFF DEBTS THAT AREN’T YOUR OWN.
If a loved one of yours dies and bill collectors (credit cards, loans, etc etc) start calling you off the hook and request that you pay off their debts, tell them in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves.
The reason being is that the moment you give them a single penny, that debt is now on YOU because you’ve now agreed to pay it off.
Do not agree to pay off their debt. Do not pass go, do not give them $200.
That happened to my grandma when my grandfather passed away. They had been separated for two years and he had some debt. They called her not even two weeks after the funeral and she told them where he was buried and ended it with “when you get your money bring me back some too.”
First of all: Marie Kondo’s decluttering philosophy is not just some “woo-woo nonsense” she came up with on the fly. The Ascent explained that she’s using practices from Shintoism, which includes beliefs that nature and material things have spirits and must be treated with respect.
She’s not shoving her beliefs down your throat. In fact, she told Refinery29 that you don’t have to change your home if you’re comfortable with clutter. Just make sure “you still have a designated spot for each item, and also to understand how much quantity of each category of things you have and need.”
Marie Kondo: Maybe treat your home and possessions with respect, here are some methods to help you stay organised but feel free to tailor it to your self own life 🙂
The internet: Holy shit this woman must be burned at the stake immediately
This is what I’ve been saying when people bring this up in real life conversation. The idea that household objects have spirits is not new. And I think that bringing these beliefs into the practice of letting things go todeclutter your life is extremely effective.
We all joke about what Toy Story “did” to us, but it really is true that many people feel an inexplicable guilt when they throw something away, not just because it feels wasted, but because we feel, somehow, vaguely, impossibly, maybe it can feel sorrow.
I’ve only seen this addressed a few times by organization experts, and even then it was mocked.
Marie Kondo connecting her culture with that universal worry and telling people it’s okay, normal, to have that anxiety, and to give them ways to cope with it (i.e. thanking the object for its time in your life) is a really effective way to help people let go of these unecessary possessions!
Moreover, in the United States, many of us have been raised by our parents’ generation on the idea of the “starter house,” a smaller space we deem only acceptable until we can “upgrade.” But our generation can’t afford that.
In the show, young couples with children say they don’t have enough space, that their house is too small, and Marie Kondo teaches them that in fact, they do, and it’s not, they just need to learn how to manage and prioritize their space. People end up happier about their situations and lives.
The truth is we do live in a highly materialistic and throwaway culture, in which we accumulate a lot that we don’t need, until eventually we are drowning in our own Stuff.
This is especially a problem among the poor and disabled (both of which I am), because we hold onto things we don’t need now in case we need them later because we can’t just buy them again. But I think that fear of throwing away something we’ll need later grows to extremes, until we are trapped in a mess created by our anxiety.
I think it’s extremely refreshing for an expert to come in without judgement, without looking at us as if being poor and living in a mess of hand-in-hand, like so many others do, and saying there is a way to bring peace to your space, no matter who you are. She meets people on a level they can function on. Everyone is different with different needs, and she works with that.
This anxiety, along with the judgement we are Used to feeling from people who have jobs like Marie Kondo is what has made so many people feel so defensive and negative about what she has to teach, but it’s no excuse for the racist and culturally negative attitudes people use alarms against her work.
I have OCD, I am poor, I have a clutter problem. Solving it isn’t easy. I’m getting rid of stuff I think I can’t possibly part with. But once it’s gone, I feel so much lighter.
You don’t have to live by her ideals or even have any interest in her work at all, but the things being said about her and the dismissal of her work and culture need to stop.
I want men to try and imagine going about your day–working, running, hiking, whatever–and not being allowed to wear pants under threats of violence or total social and economic exclusion.
That’s the kind of irrationally violent and controlling behaviour women have been up against.
Also for anyone who thinks it’s easy for women to be gender non conforming because we can wear pants.
The only reason we can is because we fought tooth and nail for the right to! Any rights we take for granted today we’re the result of a prolonged, bitter battle fought by our predecessors for every inch of territory gained. Never forget that.
Title IX (1972) declared that girls could not be required to wear skirts to school.
Women who were United States senators were not allowed to wear trousers on the Senate floor until 1993, after senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore them in protest, which encouraged female staff members to do likewise.
This was never given to us. Women have had to fight just to be able to wear pants. Women who are still alive remember having to wear skirts to school, even in the dead of winter, when it was so cold that just having a layer of tights between them and the elements was downright dangerous. Women who remember not even being allowed to wear pants under their skirts, for no other reason than they were female.
So don’t talk about women wearing pants being gender nonconforming like it’s easy. It’s only less difficult now because your foremothers refused to comply.
My mother spent her entire school career up until high school having to wear skirts, no matter how horrible the New England winters got, because she was forbidden to do otherwise. There were times when the weather was bad where my grandmother kept her home rather than make her walk to and from the bus in a skirt.
They rebroadcast a few old interviews with Mary Tyler Moore, and in them she addressed the pants issue. There was a strict limit on what kind of pants she could wear (hence, always Capri pants, nothing masculine), and to use her words, how much cupping the pants could show. A censor would look at every outfit when she came out on stage, and if the pants cupped her buttocks too much, defining them rather than hiding them, then she had to get another pair.
A prime example of how gender is socially enforced.
I remember a prolonged battle at primary school, with petitions and numerous near riotous PTA meetings before girls were allowed to wear trousers. In the late 1990s/early 2000s. In Scotland. A country which now (rightly, for the most part) prides itself on its progressiveness. Please don’t ever take these things for granted, and don’t assume that it’s only far flung places that you have nothing in common with that took so long to catch up. We’re all still fighting, little by little, for every apparently trivial victory that mounts up until we can reach the non-trivial ones. And we can’t afford to stop.
At my private Catholic high school, girls were only given the green light to wear pants the year before I began attending.
In 1992.
Yeah, 1991, forced to wear dresses in school. Got detention once because after school was over while waiting for my ride outside I took off the dress that was over my button down shirt and normal-kids-shorts-length shorts because it was Louisiana degrees outside and I was 7.
Teachers were forced to wear skirts for years. And heels. My mother’s feet are still high heel shaped when she takes off her shoes. She had to wear a skirt till I was well into junior high.
FEMALE US SENATORS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR PANTS UNTIL 1993 HOLY SHIT
I love maps! For a while now I thought there should be a pixel art map of the world, the kind with landmarks stacked shoulder to shoulder as can often be found in poster shops.
The gargantuan piece measures 1325×851 pixels, three times the already huge Venezuela map. Just like the previous two, it’s also full of tiny, cute animations.
Head on over to the original blog post to explore everything from Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon on the West Coast to the Statue of Liberty and the White House on the East.
Maybe one day, we’ll get to see the whole world in pixels!
