I work at a place whose main goal is to make money. How do people find meaning in this? Moving up in an organization to manage more imaginary numbers. These numbers control the lives of the people they are attached to, yet the most effort to grow the numbers are for those who has the most. There are very few investment services for those who have very little, very few saving services, very few credit options. And in place whose goal is to make money, this makes sense: people with little money to start off likely need it more immediately, thus they will have nothing to invest in the first place, nothing to invest, and nothing with which to pay back credit. But there must be SOMETHING we are missing. Why do we revolve ourselves around these numbers?
I want to become a teacher. The more I think about it, the more it draws me in as honest work. You are teaching these kids their future, you are planting seeds of hope and wonder and love and wiliness, so that they may overcome whatever they may face. You are showering love, and in return they will flourish, grow, expand, not like money does, but like humans do: with passion, and in a way that truly matters.
Or perhaps in government, in policy, with numbers and words that hold so much power in what they can do for this world, and those living in it. Had the Kyoto protocol been followed, perhaps the air we breathe would be a little bit cleaner. Perhaps my great-great-great grandchild would live a little bit longer. Working to give single mothers enough clothes to cover their children’s tiny fingers, enough food to fill their little stomachs; working to provide those mentally ill with support and love and warm, bright shelter. Working to give those with dreams and hopes and the wherewithal to work hard for them a fighting chance in a world that is so goddamn skewed to those with money, money, money.
No wonder our obsession with it. It drives the world. It is the vehicle in which opportunity, comfort, security is carried. But how much blood runs through its fingers. How much deceit, how many late night homes, how many tired bodies, how many tears, how many children laboring, how much sex sold, educations given up, how many stress ulcers, how much violence, how much addiction, how many drugs, how many broken families, how many shoeless winters, how many collapsed buildings, how much has money cost us?
How much has money cost us?
I say to myself every day, that this is not the way to live.
Yet each morning I wake up, do a little stretch and give a little smile, and each morning I wake up, and I live it.
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