This financial meltdown and the resultant anguish about what action to take has brought to mind a question I ask my self from time to time. Why? What is it about the movement of green pieces of paper (or the electronic equivalent thereof) that can consume so much of our energy? And why are the people who specialize in those movements so valued by what we laughingly call society?

I am a musician of modest skill, a pretty good video editor, and if I can judge by my immediate family, an OK husband and father. I feel pretty good about these endeavors. But I am also required to be responsible for making sure there is a pile of the aforementioned little green papers adequate to feed, clothe and house myself and my loved ones, basically forever. And, I will confess, I am not very secure in my green paper pushing skills. It may be that I was not endowed with the necessary counting skills to cope with such operations or it might just seem like every financial move is too much like gambling. In the end it might just be I’m too lazy and would prefer to spend what little energy I have on pursuits I actually enjoy. Whatever!

I resent the ubiquitous financial advice that surrounds us. I suppose budgeting is the skill I might at least find reasonable in that you also have to budget time to accomplish things in life. It’s all the rest that gets me. Rates of return, interest, taxes and their shelters, savings and risk etc. Those are just the terms that came to my mind. It would take a power shovel to dig through the verbiage associated with these financial maneuvers. But it a seems like a distraction from the task of actually living a life.

Back to the original question. WHY? Hasn’t humanity come far enough that we can place value without resorting to these symbolic mechanisms. I guess the answer is NO. Because if the answer was yes, we wouldn’t idolize people whose basic motivations seem to be greed. People who figured out how to devise and play these money games. games which can so control the lives of the rest of us.

I am angry that we wind up putting our money (our energy) into wars that kill millions and will be forced to spend much more of our energy into covering losses which those smart but greedy people gambled away. The reason we have to do this? The reason we are told? That reason is fear. We need to fear the other and so we need to go to war. We are told to fear being poor, hungry and unable to live comfortably so we must insure the financial system still functions. These are basic fears and our betters, our leaders, the smart ones, have learned that if things appear to be messed up enough they can get us to do things that, if we had time to think, would seem stupid and counterproductive.

So many times in the last eight years we have been told disaster was just about to strike and radical action was needed to keep the world on track. And almost every time it was said, we surrendered a little more of our rights, our heritage, our money. It was never enough. The greedy ones figured as long they have as scared they should try to take everything they could because eventually we would stop fearing them and say no. This is that time for me. We have to say no to this “bailout”. No to the theft of our wealth and no to the theft of our children’s wealth, health and heritage.