Money Wins

The Land of Broken Dreams ©Victoria Pendragon

We did it to ourselves.

We are a nation of consumers — children at heart, easily convinced by the next shiny thing that will make all the other kids in the neighborhood like us… or envy us. The strategy never works, but we are children and we are endlessly hopeful… so we buy something bigger, something that is promised to be better and brighter, something no one can ignore. And we never give up hope because the siren song of commerce every day reinforces the dream that it has seeded in our brains.

Commerce, though, ultimately consumes the consumer. We are now, to them, no more than something to fuel their insatiable greed. Our lives have no value to them than as anything other than a form of monetary exchange.

So, they ate us and they have grown big… monstrous. They have placed themselves in positions of power and they fight with each other over which one should be in charge. They spend the money that we have given them for the shiny things to tell us — in short sound bites — which one of them is the better monster, leaving us in a position that is not unlike that of a person on death row being “given their choice” as to how they want to die.

Because no matter which monster wins the race… we will still be as nothing to them. They would sooner support each other than to support the people who fed them because we are, after all, mere fodder. Money IS power and we gave up our small power to monsters for shiny things. Then they devoured us. We matter not at all to corporations except as fodder for their insatiable appetite.

We desperately need campaign finance reform. All candidates should have exactly the same funding from which to draw. Any secret, outside funding should be cause for permanent removal from the process for life. Transparency — and possibly a lie detector test — should be an absolute requirement.