Where did all my money go?

I have been thinking about this one for a while.

I listen to NPR, so I’m pretty cool. I hear lots of articles on our country’s financial crisis and I own a small business, so I know that nobody is spending money. Nobody has any TO spend. I also hear about Europe’s troubled times and it seems as if it would just be better for Greece to go all “Atlantis” and sink itself into the Mediterranean sea.

So if America has no money and Europe has no money, and we all know that Africa has no money, where is all the money?! From what we’ve seen of Russia and the former U.S.S.R. lately, it sure as shit ain’t them. And Switzerland is simply too small to hold all that dough. Who do we owe and who is just sitting on all this cash? I personally think that there is some computer hacker genius named Lloyd in northeast Alaska, sitting at his laptop in his cabin in the woods, smoking his hydroponic weed, laughing at us all with $400 trillion in a virtual bank.

But seriously, where does the balance of all of these numbers lie? Has anyone recently done a global balance sheet to see if it all actually adds up? What if Earth has a negative net worth? Kind of just blew my own mind there for a minute. And what if it doesn’t even out? What do we do then?

If we take a really crayon-y “big picture” approach to this problem, I’ve got a great solution. Do-over. Simple. Let’s wipe everybody’s slate clean and just start over from scratch. Even stevens-like. I know, then we’re getting into lots of sub-arguments like “who gets what?” and “how do you break it all down?”

I realize that a solution that simple wouldn’t work in our reality. There are way too many variables and complications. But what if we didn’t have a choice? My 8 year old son was educating me the other day about sun flares. Apparently, he was told that a sun flare will wipe out all our electrical devices for “6 months and a year” (gotta love 8ish). We would be fucked. By the way, thank you to the camp counselor who is responsible for my son’s newest source of anxiety. I digress…

If we did, in reality, experience an immense power surge, wiping out uber-data, what would we do then? Most of our money is virtual now anyway. We could go back to the olden days and barter for goods and services. Somehow, I doubt that would fly with the IT pros and web-masters of the world—what the hell would they have to offer? Darwinists may have something to say about that.

My point is that money and our perceived self worth has become so dependent on an idea—a monster created by our own minds which literally runs the show. It isn’t something that we can hold in our hands as tangible and three-dimensional, but is based on numbers on a screen which fluctuate by the nano-second. This number monster has a mind of its own now and we are afraid of it. We bow to it. We worship it. People in certain countries—even in our own country—are literally DYING because their numbers are smaller than the other guy’s and we simply look the other way because that’s just the way it is. That’s just a little insane, don’tcha think?