Tannishblog

The papers are screaming it: Barack Obama has money! Because the papers all feature this tidbit, Americans will reflexively believe that this is important. That he is young, fresh, idealistic and charismatic is no so important. What matters is that he has the money to take on the Clintonian machine.

I’m sick of America’s money-centricity. What good has it done our nation or our world that every facet of life in this country is measured in dollars? What good has it done you personally? Be honest!

 A Canadian friend of mine mentioned recently how, in America, "everything is money." Say what you want about our northern neighbors, but she was right. Status equals money. Marketing determines status. Sales determine jobs, and jobs determine salaries which determine what status symbols one might afford.

The car I drive tells others about my economic strata, as does the neighborhood in which I live, as does my choice of clothing, my hobbies, my job… From these cultural cues, strangers decide how to treat with me, how to behave. Opportunities are given or withheld entirely due to perceived social-economic criteria and not based upon evaluation of the capabilities of a person. Money drives this, and in America, there is no escape from the ingrained discrimination built into this system.

In America, money is all - money is God. We are, to a certain degree, enslaved by our addiction to money. The freedom that the political right love to espouse is relative to how much we tow the line of cultural expectations, and not at all an expression of true freedom. This is on many levels a necessary trade-off, as humankind has continually proved it is incapable of living with itself. So a set of rules that limit chaos and anarchy an unlimited free choice is necessary.

Money sets that limit. It determines who is ruled and who makes the rules. If one is to join the latter class, one must adhere to the machinery of moneymaking, and give a substantial portion of their freedom to the mechanism. To date, this is the best system humans have produced to purge the world from the failings of humanity. It’s not perfect. I would argue if any system devised by us can ever reach perfection.

But in America, the only nation which I am familiar enough with to comment upon, we have exceeded the necessity of such a monetary measuring stick and taken things to an extreme. Our culture, for all it’s homage to a Judeo-Christian Godhead, worships wealth above all. As a result, we have become dysfunctional members of a global society, of a world brimming in humanity and stunted by the false perception of gaining happiness through material acquisition. The spirituality assumed by the founders of the constitution, the religiosity they fought for and took to be a inherent part of the human experience, has evaporated.

That is why the news services make such noise over a presidential candidate’s coffers. It is more important than the man or his message, and will be given more airtime as the contest continues. In this century, more perhaps than any other, power is commodity - just another thing to buy and sell. The common denominator of America is $.