They say that money makes the world go around, but isn’t it really the lack of money that does that? I mean, when you don’t have money you are forced to be creative with everything. Why do you think that most inventors talk about coming “from nothing” and “making something” of themselves? It is this lack of money that is a driving force in our world today. If we don’t have it, we want it, and we think of a lot of ways to get that money, honey.
Rappers sing about it until it becomes just a constant drone on the radio and in your beats by dre headphones. Jay-Z, or Ludacris, or T.I., or even Eminem laying down the dope rhymes about how much cash they make, and how they spend it lasciviously on everything and anything their hearts desire. They make it sound so glamorous, occasionally talking about how they came from nothing so they appreciate this new-found largesse, etc. But if they really appreciated it, why take so much time talking about how much they appreciate it? That’s simple. Because they don’t appreciate it. They want more, even though they haven’t found real ways to spend the money they have already accumulated. These are the same guys who complain the most about piracy because “it takes money out of our kids’ mouths.” Well, that sentiment aside, Mr. Kanye West (because money shouldn’t be in his kids’ mouths, after all), I don’t see their kids starving. You see what I mean?
Then you have the former sports players who in their primes made millions of dollars just for throwing a ball, or catching a ball, or hitting a ball, or hitting other people to stop them from getting or advancing a ball. These players who you hear about so often filing for bankruptcy not long after retiring from the sport that gave them all this money, only to see it all disappear, and indeed they are even in debt by that point. Why is this? That’s also simple to explain, because they don’t value money. They don’t remember what it was like to have nothing, even though so many of them came from nothing. So, they squander their money on STUFF, you know, things they don’t need or even want after a certain point, things they probably couldn’t line item for you if you asked, things that got repossessed when they couldn’t afford them anymore.
The value of money is an intriguing thing. Most times I don’t think we consider it, but all money is — is paper, and scraps of metal shaped into circles. Or more recently, it’s the idea that we have money, when we scan our debit cards and our accounts are deducted accordingly. What’s really amazing to me is the idea that we don’t have money now, but we will have money in the relatively near future, when we use those things we call credit cards. People run up so many credit card bills because it’s so EASY to do so. We don’t have to think about it for a month, and when the time comes to pay up, we only have to pay a fraction of what we spent! It’s like a miracle — until we reach our credit card limits, the bank is calling us to pay up, and we still don’t have money in our bank accounts. Oops. That’s why while we pay homage to the almighty buck, we don’t value money nearly as much as our ancestors did. We might want to take a page from their book sometime and never forget where we came from. Money or not.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 