Money

Here’s a post about money (as you may have gathered from the title.) I’m writing it because I always disliked money, but now I think I hate it. I’ll start you off with a segment of a short story:
The thickening wind left Kiara with little choice but to retreat into the milkbar to her left. The overpowering force bellowed behind her, pushing her semi-unwillingly through the doors. Kiara straightened her back and took off her beanie, letting her short red hair breath in the warmth of the shop. School had been kind to her today, and Kiara’s backpack contained a limited weight of books. She left it on her shoulders. Looking around the store for something warm, she noticed one last donut under the Serve-Yourself-Hot-Food sign. As she reached for the donut, an unexpected hand touched hers.
“You can have it” the boy who owned the hand insisted. His eyes glistened sky-blue and Kiara was momentarily silenced by his charm. He smiled knowingly and gazed back, with equal entrancement, into her eyes.
“Are you sure?” Kiara asked, despite not caring about the donut at all anymore.
“Absolutely. I got the last one yesterday” he assured her. So Kiara smiled thankfully, and grabbed the last donut for herself. The boy opted for a hot-chocolate - which he made from the coffee machine next to the hot-food section - and the two of them walked to the counter together.
The boy gestured for Kiara to get served first, she smiled thankfully (again) and payed for her donut. The boy set his hot-chocolate on the counter.
“That’s $4” the shopkeeper recited. The boy seemed surprised at the cost, and began to rummage through his pockets, pulling out 20 and 50 cent pieces now and again.
“I’ll get it” Kiara stepped it, giving a five dollar note to the shopkeeper. She took the dollar change and handed the hot-chocolate to the boy. “Here you are” she said pleasantly, but the boy frowned and briskly walked away. Kiara was somewhat shocked and couldn’t figure out what she’d done wrong. Did he want to pay for it himself? Was he embarrassed? Had she managed to offend him in her attempt at being nice? Maybe he had enough change in his pocket, maybe he didn’t. Either way, Kiara was uncertain of how things could have worked out better. She took her donut from the counter and trudged off into the bitter outdoors.

As you can see from this little story, money is often fairly complicated and it’s impossible to know how other people feel about it unless you talk to them. If Kiara hadn’t interfered, and the boy had bought his own hot-chocolate then the two of them could have become good friends. Or something more. But, because of Kiara’s generous and caring nature, the situation has ended in confusion and dislike.

Money brings out the worst in people more frequently than it brings out the best. Greed, jealousy and lies spring off money far too often, turning our world to corruption and leading happy people to desire wealth and material items over love and living things. There are so many people who have forgotten that money is meant to be a way to help humans live in harmony, it wasn’t supposed to tear relationships apart and cause uncountable amounts of conflict. The worst thing about money, is that I can’t think of a good replacement for it. It’s hard to successfully claim you hate something, when getting rid of it seems foolish. There are a few alternative options to living in a world with money:
1. We go back to trading. I’m fairly sure this would be disastrous, there would either be too many rules or not enough rules “my carrot is SO worth your potato!” could be replied with either “no it isn’t. It says here in my copy of the Trading Laws Manual on page 567, paragraph 10... that carrots have to be double the weight of the potato for trade to be equal” or “no it isn’t. I say you give me three carrots and I give you one potato” the later will eventuate into a heated debate. So, it doesn’t seem smart to return to trading.
2. We have no personal belongings, everything is shared with everyone. We are all equals. Obviously this would be awful, we have developed too far in having our own possessions and working hard to earn more items. There is no way we could successfully go back from that. However, if I started my own little country, perhaps this would be an ideal way to live.... then again, children lacking a favourite toy of their own, people working hard to supply food for everyone else ending up with just as much as someone who doesn’t work at all... wouldn’t be particularly pleasant or involve less conflicts than money. It wouldn’t prevail, so let’s not do that.

I could come up with one or two more ways of living, but I’ll leave it there. The point is, we have invented money and there’s no going back from that, it works well but it is poisonous. Money would be perfect if humans were perfect, but we’re not, we have a touch of greed in us that is highlighted when money becomes all too desirable.

Sometimes money brings out the best in people. It gives those who are generous a chance to act, to donate lots of money to charities etc. Sometimes I find it hard to understand why a cure to a disease, or a starving country can’t just be helped and supported without money. Money is paper. Paper doesn’t come up with scientific breakthroughs or produce food. Humans, and the earth, do that. I know it’s the way of our world, but why can’t we just fly over to poor countries and build them good houses, give them food to grow for themselves and help them without the need for practically useless bits of green paper?

To conclude, I’ll just say that I know my opinion is fairly unique and rather debatable. I just don’t get why someone shouldn’t be able to finish building their house merely because they’ve run out of pieces of green paper.