The marketplace for everything, especially debt

Want some health care? Need a place to live? Are you hungry? Need a gun? A politician? A drone missile? All those and more, much, much more, are available all day and all night at the marketplace and you don’t even have to leave your home to go downtown or to the mall to do your shopping. It’s all there for your consuming convenience on your computer, iPod, smart phone, dumb phone or other products that can be used to charge purchases to your plastic for anything and everything, anytime all the time. Nice?

Until your credit runs out. Or you lose your job. Or you didn’t have a job or credit in the first place. In which case, none of those things will be available to you.

It might not be too painful going without a weapon or a missile or a rented if not fully owned politician but lacking food, clothing, shelter and health care make it really tough to survive. In fact, science, religion and numerous polls paid for by market researchers make it clear: It’s impossible.

We are currently being told by some that the private insurance profit program called Obamacare has created a wonderful health care marketplace and is the greatest thing we’ve ever had, and by others that it will kill people, destroy the economy and bring attack from outer space or worse. Both arguments avoid the major question:

How come we have to go to a marketplace and purchase health care and everything else we need in life? And who, or what, decides how much money we need to have in order to get whatever it is we need and how deeply we go into debt once we no longer have that money? Where and when did that process start? At the Garden of Eden? During the American Revolution? At a Christmas sale? Who started it? God? The Iroquois? Morgan Guaranty No-Trust? More important, how can we control that process before it produces not only greater inequality than already exists, but worse, an end to the process of life itself?

Consumers—at one time called citizens but that was long ago—have run up personal debts in this marketplace that add up to hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. And the nations and societies where they once were called citizens have debts equaling many trillions more. Does this mean everybody is leading a wonderful life with all the stuff we’ve purchased even if we don’t need it and don’t have the money to buy it?

Does a snake have wings?

If we’re so happy and content how come we have to spend hundreds of billions to protect ourselves from Nazis, commies, terrorists, anti-Semites, burglars, street criminals, suite criminals, invaders from outer and inner space, vampires, sitcoms, the landlord, our in-laws, finance companies and so much else that has us constantly at our wits end, worried sick and living in fear?

Reminder for the arithmetically challenged among us: we are talking very, very big numbers that have moved from millions to billions to trillions in a very short period of historic time.

For example: A trillion has twelve zeros and is equal to a thousand billion, each of them having nine zeros. Got that? A billion seconds equal 32 years. In current media-speech, that’s more than three decades. Wow? But a trillion seconds are equal to 320 centuries. That’s 32,000 years. Huh? Again to put it into a form that might make it clear to those who can no longer say “ten years” but are compelled by custom, habit and/or language and logic disability to only use the word “decade,” those trillion seconds would take 3,200 “decades” to pass. However we say it, that is a very, very, very long time. And remember, we are speaking about very, very, very large dollar numbers, in most cases equally beyond our ability to comprehend except as abstractions with seemingly little meaning in everyday life.

Now back to our personal and collective-as-a-nation debts. Think of those numbers for a second or a minute or all day or, if you’re really slow and hung up on current media mind mash, a decade, and in the words of Ricky Ricardo, “‘splain to me, Lucy, how we gonna pay that money?” Or more realistically, whether we should even try, and when we should start canceling it, and whether to begin that cancellation at a personal, state, national or global level.

We should all know about our unfortunately massive global marketplace for garbage. We are burying our planet in layers of our economic species feces. How about seeing much if not all debt for the garbage that it is, a putrid life threatening smelly dump for those of us who don’t have enough political power (guns, drones, etc.) to force its payment to us, but under the guns and drones of those with the political power to force our payments of it to them. Hmmm.

What would happen if a whole lot of us, not just one community but many in unity with many others, told “them” we are cancelling the debt? If we did it in great enough numbers, like maybe close to the seemingly incalculable figures called national and accumulated personal debt, what would happen? Of course democracy would have to play a major role in getting us to take that step. Some think we are a democratic society already. Hmmm. Bring this subject up with your democratically elected representative and see what reaction you get. Disregard that reaction and begin working with your fellow citizens to stop consuming for just a while and begin planning to bring about a happier environment by first cancelling the debt and then seeing what it is we really need and where we should go to get it. We could save hundreds of trillions of dollars and our race as well. Who would be against such a sensible plan for humanity?

Guess.

Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears in print in The Independent Monitor and online at the Legalienate. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.