By Edwin Cooney
It’s my guess that if you have any sense of importance, priority, or especially a sense of high purpose, the chances are you’ll dismiss this week’s musing as a lot of trivial nonsense! Well, that’s okay with me, but be careful. I may be about to put my finger on a future element of exceedingly dangerous national insecurity!
With all the fear and suspicion that 2016 politics offers voters including panic over ISOL and disdain for our present and future national leadership, perhaps the most unsettling reality of all is the possibility that the Russians and Chinese have access to our national intelligence and security systems, to our bank accounts and, worst of all, to our private emails and perhaps to the entire internet. Fanciful as it may be, the most effective gateway to our national vitals (which can be defined as that which matters to us the most) would surely be if a foreign power could monitor our money. After all, more than anything else, money is what really matters to 2016 America!
I know, you’re about to scold me insisting that “freedom” is America’s most valuable asset. Nuts! Everyone welcomes money! It doesn’t even matter if they already possess a lot of it; the more the merrier! As for individual freedom, it’s okay so long as the freedom of certain political, ethnical, and religious people is limited and ours is maximized or otherwise protected. Money, on the other hand, is the object of unconditional love. It’s even dearer than Old Glory and freedom combined. After all, a thousand American flags won’t come close to buying you a used automobile! Additionally, money possesses value which is second only to the continuance of our beating hearts! (These days, if you have enough of it, money can even buy you a beating heart!) Freedom is merely conditional on good behavior, likability and, very often, on whether or not one possesses enough of it.
One of the most heartfelt traditional beliefs in America is that “money talks.” Of course, it’s the value of money that talks the loudest. Still, no matter the economic conditions under which we live, whether it is President Herbert Hoover’s deflation in the early 1930s or Jimmy Carter’s “stagflation” in the 1980s, if you have enough dollars, life is very good indeed.
Thus, you might ask what could be worse than our present concerns about ISOL, immigration, climate change? Is it Hillary Clinton, “the liar,” or Donald Trump, “the scheming ignorant con man”? The answer is obvious — talking money! Talking money could be more deadly than worthless money. After all, worthless money is no longer money. Just ask those who still possess Confederate Money! Now you ask, what could make money talk? The answer is simple — microchips, stupid!
I’ve often wondered, who are some of the people who once possessed the dime with which I used to buy a cup of coffee? Back in 1964 when I was just 18, it wasn’t unusual for me to be carrying a dime that had been in circulation for 8 or 10 years. Perhaps Mickey Mantle or Elvis Presley once owned that dime, nickel, penny, quarter or fifty cent piece. It’s not at all unlikely that you may yourself possess a nickel that once graced Donald Trump’s pants’ pocket or Hillary Clinton’s purse. If money could only be doctored in a certain way, that money might yield far more than its value. Another way of saying the same thing is: “if only money could really talk!”
Of course, very few of us take time to gaze at FDR’s left profile on the dime, Thomas Jefferson’s new full face engraving on the nickel, George Washington’s changing left profile on the quarter, or John Kennedy’s handsome left profile on the fifty cent piece. Recently, there has been a debate about whether to redesign the ten dollar bill or the twenty. When I last checked, it had been decided to replace Jackson on the twenty with a woman for the first time, Harriet Tubman.
The irony here is that by honoring the great among us and stamping our coins with “In God We Trust,” we already have a tradition of humanizing money. Of course, in numerous ways money is already “human” in that it is fallible. Money, like all human institutions, is vulnerable to noble or mischievous uses by creative and powerful entities, foreign and domestic.
If only money could reveal where it has been and what it has seen, imagine how it might well increase what we already know about one another. It would be far superior to the often imagined “fly on the wall.” Flies don’t usually live very long. Coins, on the other hand, are exceedingly rugged.Even more to the point, coins are invariably stored beneath the cushions of couches or chairs in living rooms in which very revealing conversations take place. Thus, is it any wonder that someone sometime may seek to enable money to possess more than monetary value?
I think that’s possible. Fortunately, such a likelihood seems rather far off. Perhaps its revelation is sufficiently far enough ahead to be an issue in the 2116 presidential campaign. The debate will be over the taxability of our money. Since money already “talks,” imagine by 2116 our money is even more human than it is today. That being the case, Americans will actually have gained another legitimate freedom, a right we can brag about from the housetops without fear of any legitimate retribution. Our money will be like our children, lovable and even more — tax deductible. If money isn't taxable, then nothing can seed government sufficiently to “…elicit, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”
If our government can no longer collect any taxes, that’s a definition of national insecurity if you ask me.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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