Time and Money

Well, Friends, my car is broken. Not just a little broken, either. Real broken. Broken worse than any window or any sports fan's spirit after his team's big Loss. What began this morning as a punctured tire escalated into an astounding One-Thousand Seventy-Six dollar price-tag within a matter of hours. Funny how car problems always occur all at once. Either way, let me be the first to tell you that news like that isn't easy to swallow after just having spent the past eight hours, overnight on top of things, awake and working in a cramped cubicle. In that state of mind, the difference between twenty-five dollars and eleven-hundred is Earth-shaking. Diabolical, even.

Is it just me, or is this recent misfortune a creepy metaphor for our lives today? For society today? Show me a facet of the World nowadays that does not focus and revolve around Money, and I will show you the Doomed. The Barren and the Weak. Without currency, finance, savings and chequing accounts, bills, coins, debit and credit, today's average Human Being is destined to Failure. Modern Life has complicated itself into a corner and Mankind is being forced to battle its way out. It isn't pretty and it isn't neat, but it is a fact. If Money is, indeed, the root of all Evil, then now is a good time to be very, very afraid.

Perhaps this gruesome lifestyle came about with the new Millennium, as a Wave of the Future. We are, after all, living in Futuristic times. By now, I think humanity was expecting a little bit more than it has: the Hover-board, evening trips to the Moon, holographic televisions. Things that were inconceivable back in the seventies and eighties are frantically being churned out to meet a rapid-growing list of demands. People want Change. People want Bigger and Better toys and gadgets than they have ever had. Then, those exact same People complain to me about the rising cost of Gasoline. They wail and whine and moan about how much everyday instruments, such as nourishment and toilet paper, "used to cost". They bellyache when charged seventy dollars for their Child's birthday gifts. "Back in the day, I wouldn't have paid over forty dollars for something like this!" The gifts have gotten cheaper and the prices have sky-rocketed.

Welcome, Friends, to the Economy. I'm not about to pretend that I understand this self-perpetuating machine that controls our Lives, but I think I get the basics. Enough, anyways, to know that it isn't moving anywhere promising anytime soon. Honestly, and I want you all to take a moment to reflect on this question yourselves, Who or What, exactly, is to blame for the grisly state of our Economy? Is it really the desire to finally expand ourselves into "The Future", where there is such a thing as Time Machines and all of our meals come to us in a pill-format? Or is it pure, basic, simple Greed that is taking over our World at an alarming rate? From oil companies to Musicians and Movie Stars, afraid to lose precious dollars to nasty, filthy Pirates who want nothing more than to enjoy their Wares at no cost?

Who's to say? Certainly not I, Friends. I, for one, am not here to Judge where the problems of the World are derived from. I'm just here to discuss Money. What an awful, black, corruptive catalyst Money is. What else, pray tell, do people crave more than Money? Power, perhaps, but any fool knows that Power comes with Money. People will steal it, People will kill for it. People will swindle it, manipulate it, launder it...aside from it's actual usage, everything surrounding Money seems to be sinister and devious. The Root of all Evil, indeed!

Take this example to Heart: The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, a Native American group, has formally approached local telecommunication guru MTS, regarding revenue sharing. The AMC is calling for a share of MTS' profits stating that their "transmission of signals," telephone and internet, passes through "Their" airspace and that they are entitled to compensation, as air a resource no different than Their land or water. I wonder if this sets a precedent for property-owners to declare the air inside of their homes as 'Theirs'. In fact, I own a car, and as beaten-up and misshapen as it is...am I to believe that, wherever I may be inside of said car, that airspace belongs to me? If that is, in fact, the case, I would like all telephone companies, from MTS to Telus, to begin mailing me monthly cheques for the usage of that air. Cash will be accepted, so long as it remains of larger denomination. No small bills.

I am, indeed, aware that I am now bordering a fine line between Greed and a racially-oriented lawsuit, but the absurdity of the whole situation is laughable. Whether the group in question is entitled to Money for reasons unfathomed by this Writer is beyond me. What I do know is that if we begin to put a price-tag on Air, then Humanity and Society will have sunk to a new low. Friends, we are moving closer, step-by-step, to being surrounded by Latex bubbles, holding shotguns to protect our own Personal, Designated Space. Welcome to the Future.

Ha. The Future. I, for one, want no part of it, to be completely honest. All I want is my car back. Whether the price tag is eleven-hundred dollars or one Billion dollars, I miss driving into the sunrise and admiring it's sheer, mystical beauty. I miss the cool wind gusting through my open window, cooling my face and tussling my hair. And if MTS isn't going to send me my compensation cheque in time to pay off my bill, then I suppose I'll just have to work a little bit harder and earn the Money myself.

The good, old-fashioned way.

Andrew Leite is a part-time writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. While holding down a steady job, he still delivers his witty and often insightful banter on a regular basis. Andrew writes both Fiction and Non-Fiction. More of his work can be found here.