Wednesday, August 10, 2011

S&P The Dashboard Light

Several years ago I was running some errands on a beautiful fall Saturday afternoon. My friend Tom tagged along. After the errands we planned to stop at Lou’s on Walnut Street and watch some football.


All of a sudden one of the dashboard lights lit up on my silver Chevy Citation. Cars are supposedly a guy-thing but I’ve never been very knowledgeable about them. First, I have a physical disability that makes it extremely difficult for me to get under the hood or crawl under the car and tinker around. Secondly, I’m just not really that interested in changing belts, oil filter, etc. I would rather make my car payments, get it inspected, and if it needs service pray that I don’t get ripped off too badly.

So I turned to Tom and asked his opinion on the situation, hoping that his diagnosis would not put a complete damper on our afternoon. Without batting an eyelash he said, “I think your dashboard light is bad.” I decided to go with Tom’s expert opinion and ignored it. We had a great afternoon and luckily the problem turned out to be minor. In the back of my mind, however, I knew that this was probably not the best way to handle my problems.

Earlier this week I was reminded of this incident after Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt. Instead of acknowledging the problems with the economy and the political system trying to fix it, President Obama and others decided to criticize the dashboard light – S&P.


I never asked Tom for his opinion on car matters again.

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