COMMENTARY

I have been saying this exact same thing. Your first statement sums it up. Money is extremely important in our society. It is a language that everybody understands. People live for it, people kill for it, and so people die for it. It is the symbol for "the American Dream", and acquiring it is a necessary stepping stone to success, but it is simply paper. It is an icon that shows how much you own, how hard you have worked, and generally where you should be placed in our societal hierarchy, but it seems that we have lost the logic that it is just a symbol. I mean, the idea that money has become something that can determine our fate, our future. Life and death based on money. It's shocking but unbeleivably true that our society has become that sick. I agree with Danny when he says that your word choice and the flow of your essay worked rather well. I also agree that yes capitalism is one of the best ways that our economy could go, however I don't personally believe that it will necessarily work for us. There will always be the group of people that stops us. For instance, I just watched this video of where everything comes from to it's production to it's disposal and the series of events that are inbetween. Basically what it said was that once 9-11 occured, it said that the government simply told us to shop. Shop until you basically run out of money. And that's the way we delt with everything from there on out. So we live in this cycle where we get caught up in the idea of consumption that we don't even really think about the money, it's what we can get with the money. Go to work to make money, come home and watch television filled with ads telling you how everything you own sucks so you should get new things so in order to make yourself feel better you go out and buy something. The next day you go back to work to make back that money that you just spent on something completely pointless. We are trapped in such a misconstrued society it's unbeleivable. So all in all, I beleive one of the only main disputes that I have with anything you've written is the fact that I don't necessarily beleive that it's the money that drives us to be what we have become as a society, it's what we can actually get with that money. That little piece of paper so we can buy the latest computer becuase apparently the last one wasn't good enough. Good stuff though, Adam. Really liked it, hope something I said in here helped at all and if it didn't then maybe it just stroked your writing ego =]