“Bum” was my first wife’s pet name for me; mine for her was “Kid.” Having mooched a lot from a lot of pals over the years, and possessing only a fragile self-esteem, the nickname felt comfortable. It reinforced my self-assessment, fer shure, but I didn’t notice because it matched.
Now at midlife, I pass actual bums asking for change in my new hometown of Ann Arbor. Twinges of conscience for dismissing them strike me louder than most because my karmic debt load resonates like a piano string to a tuning fork.
Must I give every friggin’ bum something? No; not everyone gave me what I asked. But when I do give, how much should I give? And just when, exactly, does my debt get paid off and make the bums go away? Does the ancient Egyptian law of Amra – that law upon which the Hebraic, then the Christian, requirements for “tithing” are based – work in reverse? Must I give ten times as much as I ever received, a sort of cosmic mathematical reciprocal of Amra’s ten percent? And only to break even!? That would require at least 20 cartons of cigarettes, just for starters, probably many cases or kegs of beer, and a trunkfull of scraps of paper. The money … who knows. But I know that I rarely asked for cash. Always a thing or a favor, but rarely cash.
I am generous with my favors; I rarely refuse even unpleasant menial tasks like loading boxes of stuff when a friend is moving, carrying their trash to the curb – “since you’re leaving anyway,… " – or standing in line while they go piss. Similarly, if I have something and someone wants it, it takes very little effort to pry it out of my hands. But money?
The payroll deduction made it easy to give a full percent of my gross to charity. Like taxes, you never miss what you never get. Taxes often become refunds. Charity only pays off with internal rewards: a boost to self-worth for being generous, a sense of well deserved smugness, and the same sense of temporary relief from debt that accompanies mailing the bills. THAT’s the meaning of the platitude, “It makes you feel good.” And, of course, old Amra’s law of mathematical reciprocals (10x vs. 1/10th) does feel a lot like the endless monthly rent payment from which I’ve never managed to escape.
So how do you escape this game of money anyway? After trying for years to win, and then giving up to re-assess the whole thing, that one question remained. How can a sane, sensible, healthy, educated fellow escape from money?
My review and re-assessment of the grand plan of life in the cosmos compared to life in the city exposed the ugly truth of an allegedly healthy economy: you must always work and must always make money from the work. We are not permitted to be moneyless.
Moneyless differs from poverty. The poor, like the bums, engage in the very same perpetual scramble for money that every productive working person in the Western World does. Most of the Third World, while envying our toys, look at us like we’re insane. The moneyless pauper in the jungle can build his family’s home in hours, days, or weeks, not a 30 year mortgage. Then, assuming some CIA/Islamic/corporate sponsored guerilla group doesn’t kill them, the unmoneyed, mortgage-free couple can plant and farm to meet all their family’s needs. With a few tips in modern sustainable farming, a bit of industrial engineering knowledge, they can prosper without ever seeing so much as a wooden nickel. Usually averaging fours hours work/day.
I, like you, cannot live without money because employers require promptness which requires transport which requires money. Employers require presentability which requires clothing and requires daily showers which require a home which requires lotsa money. Simple alertness requires decent food. It grows into a very long list of contingencies that inevitably point not to my health, sanity, and eager industriousness but simply to money. And employers only want to give me less (proportionately) than I want to give to a bum.
But escape from money takes … money! For a plot of land, materials for a handbuilt home, for the seeds to plant, the education and knowledge to do it successfully, and food while the plants grow.
Yet it is precisely that escape from cash that all our pursuits of cash hopes to achieve. In the economic game, we're all just bums.
-Dennis R. Mannistoº, Saturday, May 24, 2003