To take a break from the rice and beef’s excellent European adventure, I’d like to recall a sign I saw at a gas station pump while driving through Iowa this past winter. With its simple, scripty (and paradoxical) text, the sign embodies everything that has gone wrong with our financial system in the past few years.

Pre-heating an oven after will give you cold lasagna. Pre-recording a television show after will give you a half-hour of blank air time. Pre-boarding an airplane after will give you small children and people in wheelchairs gripping desperately onto the wings as the plane takes off. Pre-paying the cashier (or the bank for that matter) after will give you a consumer credit crisis. Voila! That’s what we have.

It is to signs like this one– that tell us it’s OK to spend after we consume– that we owe our current standing. The trickle down theory is hard at work. Sometimes economic prosperity trickles down. But sometimes irresponsibility trickles down as well. When banks tell you’ll be fine if you buy a house you can’t afford, when they tell you to “pre-pay after” by giving you a teaser interest rate, they do irreparable damage to society.

It could be said that this sign is incomplete, that it should read something like, “Please Pre-Pay Cashier After 9pm.” Yet it doesn’t. If it was meant to give a specific time, no one filled it in, creating an image of total apathy, an apathy which is compounded by the sign’s new meaning. Why do today what you can do tomorrow?

Because we can. Because we should. Because we must. That’s why.

It’s time to take our cues from our own sense of decency and feasibility. It’s time to ignore those who try to tempt us into our own doom by seducing us with the option of disregarding our responsibilities. It’s time to take back our economy from the morons who think it’s OK to screw over thousands of people if it means getting a 7-figure bonus at the end of the year.

We are so over that.