Money is Everything.
Throughout my life, I’ve heard people say confidently that money isn’t everything. They go on about how material items are just things and that things ultimately have no real value. But in at least one exception I would like to take with that point of view, and is ultimately less debatable I think, is that money is the key to our freedom. That is, the freedom to decide what you want for dinner, the school you send your kids to, the destination of your vacation and accommodations when you get there, the quality of the life that you want outside of work, what kind of conditions you will face when you have medical needs or are too old to work, and to a large and increasing degree, what kind of treatment you get from others in the world. In fact, it could be argued that money IS everything. Oh sure, there’s family and other people to consider, but in the interim between our birth and death, our value is derived by the things we do for others and money is a facilitator to the quality and degree that we’re able to deliver those things.
Like it or not; rail against it or love it, we’ve coddled and raised our infant of capitalism to the mature and some would say octogenarian adult that it is today. We’ve embraced, celebrated, put it ahead of everything that we should inherently care about and nurture and allowed it to make us slaves. In a very real sense of the idea, we are in fact, modern day sharecroppers. Most of us no longer have to work in a field or a mine to earn a living, but how many of us own our houses outright, without mortgages? How many of us own our cars or don’t have credit card debt? We work so that we can buy things and support the oligarchy like good servants to our masters. Somehow, we are happy about it too. Not just happy, but willing to send our sons and daughters to die for it in foreign countries, never mind whether they actually represent a threat to our “freedom” or not; it’s what our masters desire and it’s what our masters will get. In fact, some of us will kill others if they perceive the ‘others’ are a threat to this way of life that they love.
I’ve been fortunate enough in my life that I’ve had some amount of autonomy and freedom. I’ve not made a huge amount of money by any measure but I’ve mostly always made enough to make my own decisions about the things I mentioned above. It’s been quite a nice life actually. Sure I complain about a lot of things. And frankly, most of them are first-world, mostly-affluent problems that most hard-working blue-collar Americans would scoff at. But, in reality I truly do know that I lead a privileged life with choices and better cuts of steak (though I’m mostly vegetarian; see the kind of complaints I have?). I truly do understand that I could be in a much worse position, not having the ability to pay my mortgage or car payment, or having to drive a car that breaks down constantly, or even worse things that so many Americans and those outside our until-recently at least, protected bubble, must face every day without relent or relief. Does that make me less attuned to other’s suffering or their lack of choice? Of course not. I know how much milk costs. I know that most people, even in this country only dream of going to the grocery store without having to look at the cost of every item and weighing whether buying the store brand of cookies is going to make them unable to afford their kid’s braces. I’m not immune nor blind to the cost of living in a world where we value celebrity and criminals (often one in the same) over hard work and unwavering dedication to family. I’m not blind to this world that rewards college kids who write computer programs that enable us to share photos with each other, with literally billions of dollars, while people who can barely feed themselves or their families work two jobs just to subsist. I’m just not effective at changing it. Frankly I don’t know how or even where to begin. Little changes seem too…well, small. And suddenly it also feels like there are forces of our own that are working against not just ours, but their very own best interests. As Billy Joel writes, ‘we didn’t start the fire…it was always burning since the world’s been turning,’ and that makes me wonder how much control we really have over the seemingly escalating chaos.
It is frustrating and disheartening that so many of us have access to tools of change including technology that we can use to unite against tyranny and tear down the challenges that we all face, and yet so many of us are working against our own interests. It’s funny (not ha-ha but the other kind) because I like to compare some groups of people to children who don’t know any better. They really think they are working to protect some way of life they have that is their own. They have pure intentions, but the intentions are misguided by faults in their original logic. As a result, we are collectively similar to an overworked mother with too many kids to keep an eye on, and too tired to once again make sure that Johnny is doing his homework. There are adults that want to change things for the better, but we have so many misguided children that we are overrun and I just don’t know the answer. I’m not even sure I understand the question.
