The Love of Money Over People

Here in the "God Blessed America" the marketing and advertising industry has made it so people believe they are defined by what they own rather than by who they are.

You have an entire society based on gluttonous consumption.

It is disgusting.

So few people understand that with great wealth comes great responsibility. And that is something I don't think I am equipped to deal with.

Why would anyone be concerned what other people do with their money?

Great article, Cowboygrandpa. My father left me with a legacy of wisdom and that to me is much more than a pile of dough. I saw my siblings and my sibling's children ransack the homes of their parents when they died. It was as if this is all there was to that person, their spoils. I believe that the gift of being a human and the ability to help oneself and others is greater than any monetary wealth one could acquire. Happiness comes from within not from without so if the happiness you have provides you with enough joy to share you are doing just fine in my book.

What I don't understand is how people can love the money and the things it can buy more than a living being. It seems to me they are placing the value of money above the value of a life !!! The value of money fluctuates, and rises and falls based upon many factors. The value of life is an absolute in my book.

I have to agree. We have the ability to feed every person on this earth but greed [most guaranteed] keeps the hungry, hungry. Christians are admonished repeatedly to feed the hungry; care for the fatherless boy and widows. The Israelites were condemned for not doing this [and other things, too, but this was included]. Notice one of the scriptures. It's in Jeremiah 5:28. Jeremiah condemned the Israelites for not abiding to the law saying: They have grown fat; they have become shiny. They have also overflowed with bad things. No legal case have they pleaded, even the legal case of the fatherless boy, that they may gain success and the judgment of the poor ones they have not taken up.

John, also, said concerning the new Christian congregation: But whoever has this world's means for supporting life and beholds his brother having need and yet shuts the door of his tender compassions upon him, in what way does the love of God remain in him. [1 John 3:17]

I would think a Christian would be under obligation to help the hungry. ;-))

Cowboy Grandpa:

“What I don't understand is how people can love the money and the things it can buy more than a living being. ...placing the value of money above the value of a life !!!”

I know exactly what you mean, Grandpa. Years ago, I read a paperback authored by none other than J. Paul Getty himself titled, How to be Rich. It wasn’t what I’d expected from someone of his stature, as it were, especially since the book was maybe a half-inch thick, if that. Intrigued, I bought it and sure enough, the title was a metaphor. The book was not about some secret of how to acquire financial riches (money); it was about how true riches begin in oneself through learning in an objective manner; about not being afraid to give up hide-bound beliefs when truth is revealed; to enrich yourself with travel, especially to foreign lands and experiencing their cultures; to better yourself through others as it is the true meaning of being rich.

In my travels in the Air Force, I have acquired many of these riches that J. Paul Getty alluded to. Some of them, to be sure, were ‘material’ but still priceless because of their uniqueness. I have hiked the Black Forrest within the Eiffel Mountains of Germany and seen up close the windmills of Amsterdam, Holland. I have celebrated New Years by the Arc d’Triomphe on the Champs Elysée in Paris, France and visited its world-famous Louvre, Museum. I have stood next to the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Sphinx in Cairo, Egypt. I have swum in the waters of Hawaii and Guam and Puerto Rico. And I have flown over Meteor Crater, Arizona as well as Ayers Rock, Australia and Mt. St. Helens, Washington.

Other experiences were of a more personal, meaningful nature, more in line with your article which money also cannot buy. I have ‘broken bread’ with the Italians in Sardinia, Italy and the Japanese in Okinawa, Japan. I have raised my glass with the English in Cambridge, England and the ‘Aussies’ in Sydney, Australia. Likewise, I have also mingled afterhours socially with the ‘locals’ from Zaragoza, Spain to Angeles City, Philippines (before it was buried by the Mt. Pinatubo volcano).

Obviously, not everyone can afford to travel as I have done and truth be told, had it not been on Uncle Sam’s dime, I couldn’t have either. But you don’t necessarily have to go overseas either to be ‘rich’ in this manner. From the Giant Redwood Forest of California to the beaches of Miami, Florida; from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the French Quarter of New Orleans, there are plenty of places here to go to visit and mingle with the locals to become ‘rich’ because, as you state, it is the ‘connection’ that is made with others that money can’t buy that becomes the sum of a persons true character and the source of real riches.

I know none of this pays the rent but neither can it be dismissed as irrelevant or obsolete to our national well-being as many have been trying to promote in recent years.

I have consistently maintained that the 80’s were a transformative and transitional decade for this country. Greed and Gluttony (read-‘conspicuous consumption’) was not only made fashionable, but the acquisition of money by any means and at whatever cost to others was ‘re-packaged’ and promoted as necessary for economic prosperity and a sign of a persons ‘true’ worth while empathy for the less advantaged was and is still denigrated as a sign of weakness. Too many people, then and now, have listened to the Piper and the result is what we are today. What was once remembered by many, both here and abroad, as an honorable, magnanimous country whose word could be trusted practically implicitly has given way to a deserved image of one to distrust and be suspicious of as unbridled selfishness, deviousness and the desire to accumulate ‘things’ has increasingly crept into the national social fabric of our society.

Being rich is not necessarily about the places you’ve been, the number of ‘things’ you posses and certainly not about the amount of money in your pocket but about the depth of empathy and humanity in your heart towards others. This is the real legacy that needs to be passed down generationally as opposed to the worship of the dollar sign that is consistently being promoted today.

There was a time, not that long ago, when the fate of one of us was the concern of many.

Not anymore.

We need to bring this back or it’s all over folks.

The Fat Lady is ready to sing.

Great article, Grandpa, keep ‘em coming.