trained to make money

when I was an early teenager I really hated money
I wrote some fancy A+ essay about it
quoting “head like a hole”
raging on into the night

I had been raised by good people who believed they came from poor, struggling families
that would have been happier if they’d had more money
I was expected to go to school
and from there into further schooling
and from there into some career track
all in order to make money
and make more money

I resented the whole proposition
because I had no interest in making money
and all of my interests withered in the fire of my anger
fed by the willful ignorance of the importance of action through interest; love
supplemented by the ultimate goal: to make money

it should have been a leg on the body
but it was the whole world

I understood it then
but had no perspective

in the discussions I’ve had over the last two weeks
with my priest friend
grinding me into frustration
to look at aspects of the world that irk me
and I avoid to keep myself from despising
I saw that pattern evident as the root of the problem

Why did our governments sell out to corporations and greedy confidence tricksters sacrificing any sustainable future for quick highs?
why do men destroys the present and future lives of the majority of our population in order to amass more theoretical-number-(not actual)-cash than they could ever possibly use? why have these “rich” people of “the 1%” chosen to abuse “us of the 99%”? And why do “we”, especially those most oppressed by this system, believe siding with it will save us from it?

we have been trained to make money. increasingly so, that is all.
for months now I have been imagining a curriculum starting in the earliest of schoolings educating people in emotional literacy and articulation. developing their own “conscience”, or individual moral compass. it only now occurs to me that nearly everything I was raised to do was organized not around wholistically experiencing my human life on this fascinating and beautiful planet, not even on other realms available to me from, through, and beyond Here; but primarily to Make Money. As I perceived it in my earlier youth, to transform my life into coin.
the notion is just as utterly offensive to me as a kid as it is to me as adult… but this way of being persists… and the myriad abuses against this wondrous life that I suspected in my ignorance seem only to have more evidence in my experience.
I know that paying attention to these things gives them more energy… but does my ignoring them help to defeat them? must I become monstrous with them in order to help in the battle against them?
is my naturist’s jihad against the world of the businessman in error, like all wars are?
I should not even begin…

but seeing this american black man sitting next to me on the plane reading a book by donald trump about getting rich after listening to Leo winje on about how fucked up the world is for two weeks just infuriates me

I’m so grateful to be heading to spend two weeks now with the infant and the toddler
speeding head-long into life with complete openness and enthusiasm and raw sensitivity

please bless me with the presence to set a good example for them
and all I may…

(written on the plane from Oakland to Phoenix at 17:53 CA time, Thursday the 26, 2012)

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:.:
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