Exchange

The banks take your money. They really take it, they don’t just hold it for you, they help themselves; $20 dollars here and another 20 dollars there and a dollar fifty here and here and here. Not so much, but it adds up over time. And what do you get? You get to feel human, like an outstanding citizen. You get to have little pieces of paper with your name on them to shuffle around and around and you can use a highlighter pen in electric yellow to circle random sums. You get more little pieces of paper to exchange as legal tender, you get green paper and paper in a fancy book and you can have pictures of Garfield or Mickey Mouse or dolphins copulating printed in the background while in the foreground it says PAY TO THE ORDER OF_________ You get plastic too. Mmmmmm…plastic. That means shoes and lipstick and hot donuts and shiny cars and fancy electronic gadgets that can play movies or music or accept a collect call from your mother. FANTASTIC! You can borrow money from the bank. The bank will gladly loan you money and then collect interest, which is perfectly fair. Sometimes though, when it comes to plastic, they will slowly charge you more and more interest on the amount you owe, and if you haven’t been shuffling through your papers you may not realize this is happening, and soon your card is over the limit in bank fees, Eeee Gads! It might have been better to wait until next month to pay for that pair of shoes with cash, hard cold green papers, the ones you get after a day of sweaty labor. You don’t labor? Oh, I see, you work in an office and never even see cash. Your pay is electronically deposited into your bank account and then you get by swiping your debit card, here, there, everywhere! They have made life so easy, haven’t they? The power that passes from your employer to you to your favorite pizzeria is all transferred in the form of numbers, data exchanged digitally. You function like a straw. You toil for one corporation that transfers numbers to you and a myriad of other corporations siphons those numbers away so that you never have to handle any cold hard cash. The bank handles your vital resources for you and skims a little off the top for itself. That is only fair. They should know. They made it that way.