Money Matters

Those on the side of the evolution of human consciousness and social justice have named the obstacles to our development with words that mostly people understand—racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.. Since the first step in dismantling any toxic practices is giving them names that identify them, allow people to recognize them when they see them at work, this is vital to any movement forward. Yet more and more, I feel that behind them all is another colossal flaw in the human psyche fed by our politics, social structures and values and driving the whole show. Because we haven’t yet agreed on a name that gathers up everything about how it does its damaging work, it remains a somewhat invisible force. 

 

“Greed” is one possibility, but that is too personal and doesn’t account for the systemic qualities. “Capitalism” comes closer as defined an “economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit” (Wikipedia) but is too specific and wasn’t in place when Columbus began wreaking havoc in the West Indies enslaving indigenous people to bring him gold or the entire slave trade started. (Remember, racism was largely created by economics married to priests and scientists inventing the notion of White Supremacy so slaveholders could sleep easily at night.) We are in dire need of something that fits easily with Patriarchy, White Supremacy and … ?

 

Three examples of how it works in the United States. Once we name it and recognize it, we have the possibility of dismantling/ transforming it. The first is from my daughter Kerala’s recent piece on Substack about how our country makes parenting so difficult. She opens with a quote from another Substack writer:

 

Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and the past 5 years in The Netherlands, I feel qualified to assert that discussing a problematic “culture of parenting” in the USA is a frivolous, misleading, and irrelevant focus that does nothing but deflect from the real problem, which is that America hates people.

 

KERALA’S COMMENT: Her essay primarily focuses on the structural and institutional differences between The Netherlands and the United States that contribute to different outcomes in our parents and children. Scandinavian parents “are not better people,” she says. “They live in societies with better policies.”

 

Among these are free healthcare for children, schools not funded by local property taxes, universal pensions, labor rights, government stipends for each child, childcare subsidies, unlimited paid sick days, paid leave to recover from burnout, and “daddy day,” which “allows fathers to take a weekly half or full day off work, paid in full or at 70%, to spend with their kids.”

The United States isn’t different because we lack some of these things. We lack ALL of these things. Every. Single. Last. One.

 

Then there are these excerpts from a Facebook post by Oliver Kornetzge in which he claims (rightly, I believe) that what’s going down now in Washington is not to the side of a once functioning democracy, but at the center of who we’ve always been: 

 

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.

 

Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single fucking thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.

 

Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.

 

A bitter pill to swallow indeed. And parallel to that is a glorious history of resistance and a long list of those who refused those choices. That’s important to remember as well. 

 

But the biggest affirmation of the above, the surprising revelation of how these forces have always been working at the core of our being like a tapeworm unseen inside of us eating away at our sense of decency, justice and ability to care for each other, comes from a visiting Englishmen visiting as long ago as 1844. His name was Charles Dickens and here is his extraordinary passage from his novel Martin Chuzzlewit:

 

“It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word. Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars!”    Martin Chuzzlewit: 1844

 

And indeed, that is what we have done and continue to do. It’s no secret that Musk, Bezos and their cronies are pulling the strings of the politicians and have been for a long time. So let’s find a name for this unchecked greed, this profit over people, this “do anything for dollars” sickness that is eating away at both our souls and our social systems. 

 

And as a teacher, I always suggest beginning with the children. Teach them that it should be a crime to be a billionaire, hoarding an unfair share of resources and if someone is, at least they should pay an enormous amount of taxes (50%? 75%) to give back to the common good. To recognize when “follow the money” is at play in every dubious decision. (It almost always is.)

 

My tiny little whisper in the roar of unchecked capitalism and greed? Changing the words to the song I’ve always sung to the children Que Será. Instead of the child asking, “Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?”, already chasing after the wrong dreams, my new version is simply: 

 

“Will I be caring? Will I be kind?”

 

 I hope they will. I hope we all will. 

 

PS As for the title, I used “Matters” as a noun. But as a verb it also has its place. Ask anyone suffering from the lack of sufficient funds to buy food, pay rent, afford health care and it’s obvious it matters indeed. But as the Irish say, “After a full belly, it’s all poetry.”