“My sense of living was much lower than my sense of self-respect and pride, the fact that I had lost my right to be … free …”
That was what a desperate and angry Apostolos Polyzonis recalls thinking before the 55-year-old Greek businessman spent his last 10 euros (US $12) in September 2011 to buy a gas can which he would use to douse himself in fuel and attempt to end his life in flames.
“At that moment, I saw my life as worthless, I really didn’t care if I was going to live or die.”
What drove him to such utter desperation?
Money.
It was the same reason why, on April 4, 2012, retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas shot himself in the head in Syntagma Square during morning rush hour in Athens. In his suicide note, the 77-year old Christoulas stated that the government had made it impossible for him to survive and that he preferred to die than scavenge for food.
A translated extract from the note reads: “The collaborationist Tsolakoglou government has annihilated my ability for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone (without any state sponsoring) paid for 35 years. Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of a dynamic reaction … I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance…”
“The situation is becoming every day worse,” says Polyzonis. “Every day people lose their jobs, every day people are unable to pay rent for their house, the basics to find something to eat — the last step before doing what I did or what another human being (on Wednesday) did in Greece.”
You don’t have to be an economist to understand that we are on the verge of an unprecedented collapse of our global financial markets due to poor management of public and private finances. The crisis in Greece (and now Venezuela) is a preview of what we can expect will spread around the world and that will impact healthy and unhealthy economies alike because most nations are interdependently related in their ownership of another’s debt, their reliance on goods and services of one kind or another whose availability will dramatically plummet as stock exchanges crash into one another like giant dominoes, bringing production (and consumption) to a grinding halt. Those nations that survive their own market crash will be the target of the have-not countries who resort to warfare in order to secure basic supplies like food, clean water and fuel.
It seems so unreal, but quite likely if you dare to imagine events through to their logical end. “It’s happened before and it will happen again,” you may hear economists say.
But does it have to?
Why do we need to let money rule our lives this way? “That’s the way it’s always been,” may be your automatic reply.
So, again, I ask: Does it have to?
What other options do we have?
The only option that is staring us in the face if we had the courage to accept it: No money.
No cash. No market crash. No credit. No debt. No system based on the exchange of goods or services for another.
A true “free world.”
A system based on the supply and demand of goods and services just because we need them to survive. Humanity providing for the needs of a fellow citizen, a neighboring country, an ecosystem in crisis … all at no cost … with no expectation for repayment … ever.
No more homeless. No more prostitutes. No more daycare. No more drug wars. No more mafia. No more raping of the planet’s natural resources in the name of consumerism. No more banks. No more 99% vs the 1%. No more taxes!
No social classes based on monetary wealth. No more haves and have-nots.
Only this: A right to having the free and unrestricted use of all the things which may be necessary to your fullest mental, spiritual and physical unfoldment … without having to be rich.
What a refreshing concept!
