The Pursuit of Money and .. Tsunamis
6 Billion People walk about on the crust of this planet as if its only people that matter.
Not the people themselves but a transaction token at their disposal called money.
If you have money, you don’t have to deal with bees and cows for milk and honey or mud and compost for tomatoes.
You dish some money out to someone at one end of a chain of humans. Each person in that chain keeps an increasingly smaller share of money till you reach the other end of the chain where there is a man or woman who deals with bees and cows and mud and compost. This human gets the littlest share typically.. since his job is closes to nature.
Everything we use, water, food, oil, soil etc we take from nature and change it around to make computers and missiles and popcorn. The bees get smoke, the cows get imprisoned and the plants get harvested.
We like our nature “outside” and act like it does not matter, like its enough to “pay” other humans for taking from nature on our behalf and we don’t have to actually “give” anything back to nature.
Of course microbes feast on your cells, mosquitoes on your blood, insects on your paper, rats on your grains and so on. The viruses and mosquitoes don’t pay you either.
The order in nature is you take what you can, if you can, as per your need. The hunter-gatherer humans were like that. Even today the people who help themselves to the flowers and tomatoes from your garden are like that.. you may resent that they don’t pay you for your effort. But they think that your flowers are theirs for the taking. As any gorilla or dog might. And you can shoo a dog away, but you can’t argue with it!
Many people dedicate their life hours to the acquisition of this transaction token that means something only to other people and nothing at all to the creatures in the ocean or to the winds.
People who are thus engaged in this pursuit of money and moreover good at it, would not even breathe air unless its passed through an air conditioner once. The more they acquire the better they feel about themselves. The more secure they feel about the place that they and their descendants will have in the world of people.
An excess of money and power in the hands of a few individuals generally leads to revolutions and guillotines.
If an existing set of rules allows you to amass too much wealth and power, the other people around you will change the rules, so that you don’t get to hold onto it.
But people who are engaged in the pursuit of money as a life goal rarely study history.. so how will they know about this? They think history is pointless and should be dumped in the sea.
In this tsunami picture to the left, have you ever wondered what the people in the cars were most concerned about, a few hours before the tsunami.
Were there among those people, a few who worked without rest, all life long in the pursuit of money and power?
Was it worth it?
Considering that life is fairly iffy.. is it reasonable to have some fun in your life and do what you enjoy?
Are other people allowed to enjoy pursuit of knowledge, the study of history and science and culture? Philosophy? Art?
Is a person who dedicates his life to the pursuit of money, power and status, which only other humans value.. really better than a person who pursues knowledge? Does (s)he have a right to criticize or judge or advise a person in the pursuit of learning to “go and get a real job”?
Is the money the only measure of a human’s worth? Just because no one pays you for your learning is it worthless?
vayam iha parituSTAh, valakalais tvam dukUlaih.
samam iha parituSTO nirvis’Es’O vis’Es’ah
sa tu bhavati daridro, yasya tRSNA vis’AlA
manasi ca parituSTE koarthavAn ko daridrah – Bhartruhari
Authorship and Copyright Notice : All Rights Reserved : Satya Sarada Kandula
