God is a Capitalist

God is a Capitalist
Like trees and stars, I’ve been thinking about money. Like trees and stars (and even my very existence) I don’t know who invented money. I started asking this question, and realized like the purpose of Life, no one knew the answer.
I ask you to do one simple exercise now. I want you go back and actually experience the time, in your childhood, you became aware of a few things. I’ll take you back to mine to get you started.
When I was a child and I saw pictures of children starving, I couldn’t understand it. I asked my mother why these children didn’t have enough to eat, and she answered drought. My mother, and my father were not newspaper folk, and received their information via Jehovah Witness magazines and television. I couldn’t understand how we could have a world where people died because they did not have food or money to buy food.
It was in moments such as these, as a child, that I realized, grown ups got it all wrong.
But what happened to me is this. What happened to the me was that I was sent to schools, churches, camps, a bevy institutions that basically taught me, that that’s just the way it is. I’m not saying that that is every one’s experience, but it certainly has been mine.
As a parent, I have the enormous task of passing on to my child, belief systems that I myself never took the time to critique. I automatically pass on to Kai, just like my parents passed on to me, the need to go to school, the need to listen to authority, the need to be a good citizen. I’ve passed on to Kai, whether wittingly or unwittingly belief systems about, among other things love, sex, respect, and friendship. I do these things through what I say, how I act, and sometimes, these lessons seem very much outside of my control: try controlling a child in a supermarket who is simply just overwhelmed by the concept of a SUPER market. Do you really think human babies are designed to be surrounded by so many products? I don’t know about you, but I get confused when I enter stores that have a lot of things. My head starts darting about like its following the path of a mosquito and then I realize why I sometimes suspect I have ADD. But how can you not in this society of distraction…what are we being distracted from? Do you know the meaning of life?

Again, like every modern leisure researcher, I turn to the internet to garner my information on money. I wanted to understand this phenomena I witnessed my family and so many others around me struggle under. That I too, now found myself struggling with. Money was always being spoken about in my household in a way that stopped other conversations. Like when I was 9 and discovered I wanted to be a writer. “A writer? Ok, then you’ll be a starving artist just like your father,” my mother said, without a flicker in her voice. Whenever I wanted something, like the new shelltop Adidas that all the other kids were rocking, or a sheepskin coat my mother would always answer, on automatic pilot, “But Lesley, we can’t afford that.”
And every so often, my mother would send me to our downstairs neighbor, Willie Mae Walls, to borrow five dollars, another thing I was also confused about.
To be honest, I don’t think my mother liked Willie Mae much. But me? I was in love with her. Willie Mae Walls was my first hero. She gave me a picture of a woman who needed no man to do anything. Willie Mae lived alone. In a big apartment. She had two kids and drove a Lincoln Continental. Her door was never locked, and she would look at me with her big dark face, smile bursting through like the milky way in the Universe and declare, “Lesley, you my girl.” Willie Mae smoked Marlboro cigarettes, drank beer and worked at a bar. She slept all day and worked all night. She wore sparkling tube tops and a wig after whose style Tina Turner was inspired. She wore high heels and threw poker parties, where her daughter and I would serve drinks to her guests. When she took her daughter shopping, she not only took me, but included me in the purchases. Nothing is more confusing for a child than to witness the devoted parenting of another child. Willie Mae intuitively knew this, and never made me feel like an outsider.
My mother, for whatever reason, looked down on Willie Mae. One of them was based simply on the fact that she was American. My mother, like so many other confused Caribbean folks who migrated to the States had a very poor understanding of how her own prejudices towards African Americans had more to do with her own oppression than theirs.
Another thing that properly rocked my mother’s boat was that Willie Mae didn’t act like a lady, in her eyes. Ladies didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke and they certainly were married. Every time I did something like chew hard on my gum to pop it the way all the older girls did, my mother would say, “Stop it, that is so American, that is so unladylike. ” From the first time my mother told me that, and the way in which she said it, I vowed that ladylike was never anything I would strive to be.
But Willie Mae, may she rest in peace, was either unaware of this or she beat my mother with grace. Even back then I detected something going on, when my mother would send me to borrow money from her. I remember once I came down one evening when she was getting ready for work. I loved to see her dress up. She would place her clothes on the bed, usually a tight pair of pants, a tube top with something loose and flowing to put over it. She’d let me brush out her wig as she applied her eyelashes, and I could smell the burnt metal on the stove, as her daughter heated up the hot comb. With a face well-done-up she’d crown her head with her wig, and then take the hot comb to smooth out whatever of her own hair that peeped out from under the wig. “I only have 5 dollars, tell her she can only borrow 5 dollars.” She took the money from her bra and handed it to me. Looking back at that moment, looking back at the way she looked at me, in that way blackgirls look at you when we want to know, “Are you for real?” But I knew it was not directed at me, but to my mother, and in that fleeting moment, I learned for real, the power duality played in this world.

So what was this thing my mother seemed never to have enough of and that made her borrow from people she didn’t even like? What was this power that took her away from me most of the time, rendering tired and useless by the time she got home. And why was she working the graveyard shift? When I heard graveyard, all I could think about was death.
My mother had such a loyal dynamic to money she would not buy anything if it wasn’t on sale. And I know some of you are like, yeah, what’s wrong with that?” I’ll tell you that when I say sale, I mean sale. Did you ever noticed that back in the 90s the only people who carried Conway’s bags were people from the Caribbean? That’s what I’m talking about.
There is a running joke in my family that if my mother buys it for you, it will break. Her name is used as an adjective to describe things of poor quality. “Why should I pay all that money just to buy something with a name on it?” She’d demand, “When I could buy the same thing for half the price somewhere else.” My mother has become so indoctrinated by the ritual of discount shopping that I think when she sees those words she goes into robot mode and just, well, starts shopping. For things she don’t even need. But this would take years for her to cultivate and will prove to be that which gets between us: This money.
So, what is money? Being the amateur researcher I am, I, as mentioned before, turn to the internet. The internet is a peculiar invention. I remember when it first came out, people were reveling it like it was the coming of Christ. I had people in my face telling me that it could help educate people in Africa, because let’s face it, the world believes that the reason why Africa has so many problems is education!
But Lesley, you say, how could you be so surprised of this? You are a school teacher!
Well yes, but if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been questioning that.
But now, this just in from the news: Amy Winehouse is dead. 27 years old, and dead. The facebook buzz suggests that finally, it’s the drugs that did it, or the alcohol. Bad jokes are regaled and the masses entertained. I stumbled upon an interview with an old teacher from the school she attended, and this is what she said: After describing how the young Winehouse blew away the auditioning panel with her rendition of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” she continued on her deceased pupil, “she was naughty, quite often disruptive, didn’t like her academic lessons, although in fact she was brilliant. She was probably bored stiff. I think she was near genius, in a way.”
I have been working in schools for over six years now. I want to draw your attention to particular phenomenon I have experienced. It looks like this: In most of the classes I have taught, there is usually one or two students who are disruptive. These students have been usually or will be, at some point, diagnosed with either a learning disability, or behavioral disorder. I will be careful what I say here: All of the students that receive such a label are usually highly sensitive, aware and just wanna do what their bodies were designed to do, especially at that age: move. All they just wanna do is what their intellect was designed for: learn, real, tangible, useful knowledge. Not made to sit down for on average 6 hours: when was the last time someone made you sit down for an hour or two, where you had to ask permission, even to use the bathroom? I don’t feel like a teacher. I feel like a jail warden.
We live in a society that tells us that the way to a better life is through education. But what type of education never seems to be discussed, in any real tangible way that changes anything. And while I loved school, if I’m honest with myself, it was just because I found it so easy to perform despite the fact that I was fast asleep in most of my lessons. A better way to have spent my time would have been allowing me to do what I really wanted to do, from the beginning: be creative. School doesn’t encourage creativity. It kills it. There are tests, rules, stress, social competition, bitter teachers, textbooks full of the very people who didn’t necessarily make the world a better place, but were probably responsible for much of its problems. All you learn in school is to be submissive.
What did you say? You ask me, incredulous that I could be so blasphemous.
And I ask you, did the amount of things you learned in school balance with how much you time you spent there? Probably not.
Let me break it down to you: While my education opened my eyes to Marx, Paulo Friere, Borges, Zora Neale Hurston, Baldwin, Spinoza blah blah blah, and while I prided myself in the fact that I, much to my high school teachers’ chagrin chose a little-known “left-wing” college, I realize now that I was still only following a program that parroted, pretty much, the very system that it claimed it critiqued. I noticed how this world was run: it was still run on celebrity, competition and in the end, financial success. And that is was all about hierarchy, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’m just not into hierarchy.
The only thing most schools teach children, is to be submissive to a system that perpetuates the service industry.
And let's get back to the education thing: Can someone say Nazi Germany? I think many of them would have qualified as pretty “educated” folk.
more later...