For the love of money...

I've always had an uneasy relationship with capitalism. I actually don't understand the love of money at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it was an irregularity of my brain that I was born with or if it was learned at an early age, because I always got the impression that while my father loved me, he loved money more. My parents divorced when I was only two years old, and I would see my father on occasional visits. When I visited, he was always working long hours at his job, bragging about how much money he was making; I would wonder why he didn't cut back on work or even take a vacation while I was around. I vowed that I wouldn't be like him when I grew up.

Anyway, I actually have a hard time understanding money on a deep level. I understand that there are wants and needs in my life that I can acquire with money, but still have a hard time seeing the need for acquisition and saving of money. I have to remind myself when looking for work that I need to consider how much money a job will make in addition to whether the job will be pleasant; in fact, sometimes it's more important, I guess.

I do have a hard time understanding why the needs in particular are not something one acquires whether one has money or not. It seems deeply wrong to me that we withhold food and medical care from people who don't have money, and I tend to distrust people who are okay with this. I'm not okay with it at all.

I wanted to tell a bit of a personal story, though; it's sort of a story about how all of this broke me.

Years ago, I was out of work and searching. I wasn't really worried, because I've always managed to find work, and, of course, I don't worry about money. However, I was married with two kids, and I recognized there was a need. I had good marketable skills; I had a lot of IT experience, and I'd been working for about a decade as a database programmer. I knew there was a good job out there somewhere.

A friend from church told me there was an opening at his company for a database programmer. It was quite a distance away, but he was sure the pay was good, so I went and interviewed. The interview was full of red flags. When I had studied database administration at Oracle years before, I had an instructor who gave us some advice. He said, "If you ever get an interview for a job, and they can't fully articulate what they want, don't take the job. It's going to go poorly, and it's going to be a waste of your time and their money." In the interview, I kept asking for specifics, and they kept giving me vagueness. "Well, we're sort of... We're thinking along the lines of... We know we're going to need a database for part of what we're doing."

I said I'd consider it, and went home. They seemed very interested in me, and kept sending me emails asking if I was interested, and what salary I wanted. So there were two problems: One, I didn't think this was a goid idea, both because of the vagueness, and the commute (it would be about an hour via train). Two, they kept asking me to name a salary, but I had always been told to never be the first one to talk about salary, because they would work down from your number.

So finally, I made a decision. I'd ask for more than I thought they would give me, and when they refused, I'd turn the job down. So I told them I wouldn't do the job for less than $70k. They offered me $73.5k. It was nearly twice what I'd ever made on a job before. I felt like I couldn't turn down the offer, so I agreed.

I showed up for work not knowing why I was there, and I told everyone who was supervising me, and many of my coworkers. Surely someone would tell me what I was there for. The first few days nothing much happened, which wasn't highly irregular. I figured it would take time. I got to know my coworkers, sat in on some meetings, took tours around the buildings. (It was actually an interesting place to work, as they were a contractor that mainly designed amusement park rides, including for Disneyland. There are rides currently at Disneyland that I saw visualized on computer screens before they existed.) I was told someone would get together with me and talk to me about my role in the larger project. Any day now.

And days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. I spent a lot of time blogging (late 2008) and going to lunch in restaurants that I could suddenly easily afford. Nobody ever came to tell me why I was there. I idly wrote some code, and looked at databases which were already in use, not really knowing why. Every day was eight hours of "work" with a one-hour break in the middle, and two hours of commute, leaving very little time for my family. I felt like I had become my father.

Finally, one day I came into work, and I couldn't log into the system. I went to IT, but nobody could help me, or even explain what was wrong. I did literally nothing that day. The next day, my boss called me into his office and explained that they didn't need me anymore. They gave me a good chunk of severance pay and kicked me out. The train that would take me back home would arrive at the station around 5:00. So I waited and reflected on the months that I had just wasted of my life.

I had earned a good sum of money doing nothing. Isn't that the dream? Isn't that what you strive for in a capitalistic society? For a time there, wasn't I a success story? It didn't feel that way at all.

I found in the days and months that followed, that this had broken me. If this was success, I wanted no part of it. Like most people, I was afraid of failure, but now, in addition, I was afraid of success. I didn't look for another job. I fell into a deep depression that worsened as the days went by. A year later, my wife had left me, and I was homeless. I eventually went back to live with my mother for a handful of years before I recovered, but I think there's a part of me that will never recover, even though now, years later, I'm back with my family and working full-time. (Although I'm not working with databases anymore, despite feeling back then that it was my calling.)

I don't know if there's a lesson in this, besides to be careful about accepting a job just because it pays well. I still don't like money, although I have to live with it. 1 Timothy 6:10 says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." I believe this deeply. I believe that so very much of the evil that is done in the world today is being perpetuated by men who love money more than anything. We live in a system that rewards this pathological greed, and many people look up to the billionaires, despite the fact that they are the cause the problems of our society, and not the immigrants or the LGBTQ community.

Do you love money more than you love people? I think a lot of people do, and it makes me angry and sad and sick all at the same time. It's just pieces of paper.

Remembering Biden

So, I just thought I'd make a quick summary of my takeaways from the Biden years, since someone asked me.

1. While Trump fumbled on the pandemic response, I do think Biden handled COVID very poorly, particularly in acting like the vaccine meant the end of the pandemic. While the vaccine was helpful (I got one, but never bothered with a booster since I got COVID anyway), the virus had already mutated to the point of being vaccine resistant. This was a known fact by health officials, but the Biden administration gave misleading information. Also under Biden, the CDC lowered the quarantine time from ten days to five days, not based on any science, but based on a request from Delta Airlines' CEO.
2. Leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden was shipping billions of dollars in weapons to Russia's border, and everyone was saying Biden was going to provoke Russia into doing something ugly. Russia invading Ukraine was exactly what Biden wanted: a proxy war to make Russia look bad and exhaust their resources without commitment of American troops. When Ukraine was willing to start peace talks, Biden talked them out of it. Biden wants war in Ukraine, and clearly doesn't care how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die for it. (He apparently also wants one in Taiwan, as we are shipping weapons there, despite the US not even recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation. This would be like China shipping weapons to Hawaii.)
3. Inflation was out of control these last four years. It wasn't a problem with the economy that Biden created, but was rather price gouging by greedy corporations. Yes, Biden didn't cause it, but he also didn't do anything to fight it.
4. The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, and while this was due to Trump stacking the Court, Biden didn't do anything whatsoever to respond to the crisis. Democrats could have killed the filibuster and pushed through a law protecting reproductive rights. Biden could have expanded the Court, as was done before in history. NOTHING was done.
5. Biden, who Democrats keep calling "the most pro-union President ever," broke the railroad workers' strike, which was largely about safety. Shortly after this, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing one of the worst ecological disasters in history.
6. Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and while I do not condone the attack (although as an occupied nation undergoing ethnic cleansing, it was arguably not a war crime), Israel's response has been to murder somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Palestinian civilians. This is absolutely genocide according to the United Nations' definition, and it has been chiefly powered by American weapons. No weapon has gone to Israel that was not approved by Biden.
7. Democrats keep saying the economy is great under Biden, but all I can seem to see is record levels of poverty and homelessness. I don't care how the stock market is while Americans sleep in the street, and the Supreme Court allows making it a crime. We have billions to support killing people in other countries, but can't afford to house our own people.

This is just off the top of my head; there's really so much more. And Kamala Harris said if she was in charge, she would have done nothing different. Is it really a surprise that Americans didn't turn out to vote for her?