What a wonderful world it would be if money didn’t need to exist. We could just share the fruits of our labors with others freely, and receive those same benefits in return, all without having to rely on something that has been shown, repeatedly, throughout history, to corrupt everyone who can’t help but gather together as much of it as humanly possible.
It’s our lizard brains, maybe, or perhaps our monkey brain, I’m not entirely sure. Either way, we grab these shiny coins and these pieces of paper, these 1s and 0s in our computer databases, and we use them to scratch out an existence until finally we just die, and those 1s and 0s get transferred to someone else, usually a corporation. It’s not real. None of it’s real, though. It is completely made up. We’re literally letting people starve to death because of some numbers in a ledger we created.
I despise money so much. It’s bad enough if you’re affluent and don’t have to really worry about your day to day spending habits, but when you live in poverty, it’s all you can think about, not because you want to, but because you have to. Everything you do requires the presence of money in the conversation, whether you want it or not.
You are constantly cognizant of how much money you have, how much money you need, and why neither of those numbers will ever meet in the middle, despite your scrounging, saving, working, and “side hustling,” while people on TV tell you that the economy is doing great, and politicians are wondering why you’re so lazy.
In American culture, money is everything. It is the appraisal of not only its own inherent value according to the system that backs it, but also your human value. If you don’t have a lot of money, you’re not much of a person. It’s in our culture, all over our popular media. If you don’t have money, there is something wrong with you, it’s your fault, and you deserve where you are.
When you’re poor, you’re hit with every kind of fee there is from banks, utilities, grocery stores, our local city hall charges you to pay your own water bill. There’s a $3 “convenience” fee to pay your water bill. When I put money on my debit card, there’s a $5 “loading” fee, and a $13 a month “service” fee.
If I want to pay my electric bill, it’s a $4 “transaction” fee, despite the fact that if I wanted to pay my electric bill in person, the nearest bill payment facility is 20 miles away.
When I pay our vehicle payment, there is a $8 “processing” fee on top of the $400 a month we pay. We pay our sales tax, our city tax, our state tax, our federal tax, and at the end of the year our income tax, and all of it tracked and marked in our credit scores, which make it so we can’t get a home mortgage for $500 a month, but we can have the privilege of paying $1100 a month for a rental apartment. Makes sense if you like stabbing yourself in the face.
Fee, fee, fee, tax, tax, tax, and none of this money is for our benefit. None of it is actually going to take care of our needs. Our infrastructure is falling apart, our public services are practically non-existent, there is no real safety net, and yet, and yet, and yet we are told we have the strongest economy in history. We’re told the stock market is doing well. We’re told America is free, and it’s all big fucking lies in service to the ever expanding greed that the 1% at the top continue to pull from us, to leech from us, to wring out of us, and toss us aside, demanding we stop slacking off and keep producing more and more.
My brain is constantly awash with TV commercials and internet ads about things I need to buy, what I can sell, whether it’s my house, my car, meager possessions, or my blood, in order to afford paying the most basic of bills, in order to afford another day or another week of food and water.
We live in a hellscape flush with cash. We’re almost literally drowning in cash, none of it ours anymore, because it has already been earmarked for the people who claim to have the authority to make it theirs, and yet and yet and yet people brag about how they’re going to be rich someday.
This greed, this capitalist bullshit, has warped our values, our culture, our humanity. It’s all we talk about, it is the obsession, the ultimate dream to die covered in money we can say is ours, to live lavishly by stepping on every other human being, to enable human suffering, in order to have just a little bit of what we deserved the moment we were born.
What a horrible world money has wrought, and I understand that even under a socialist system, money would still exist, but at least it would once again be a tool to build civilization, rather than a means to an end in and of itself.
We deserve so much better than this, and I would love to never have to think about money again, but I know I will, because if I want to eat tomorrow, I have to think about where I’m going to get more money, what I might have to give up to get a handful of it, and how the system in which I live sees that as perfectly reasonable and healthy, despite the suffering it causes.
Money. It’s a gas.
.Red
