Kibristalasemia

REALITY CHECK: THROW away a three-dollar magazine you never got around to reading—easy. Toss in the garbage five dollars’ worth of food that’s gone bad; you may reprimand yourself, but you probably do it all the time. Buy a sweater on sale for twenty dollars, then notice six months later that you wore it only once; it just didn’t fit right; you give it away. Now try to zip up and throw away a dollar bill. I have found almost no one who could do this without great discomfort. Yet everything about the way the money establishment functions is calculated to distance us from our money, to anesthetize us to its power. The plastic card that slides through the machine so smoothly when we make our purchases; the automated voice of the bank’s telephone answering system that robotically answers our money questions; the digital electronic readouts of the stock exchange language that flash on our TV screens for the privileged few who understand it. . . . All of these “conveniences” leave us many steps removed from the actual thing. Most of the money we use today is in the form of the plastic cards we use as currency or the checks we write, understudies to our money. Isn’t that one reason it’s so easy to spend—”it’s only plastic”?