Capital moves throughout the world. Money exchanges hands, pockets, and accounts. On any given day, I feel like one of my main roles and programmed purposes in life is to move money from one place to another. Either I move funds from my checking to savings account, I swipe my card to purchase a coffee, or I cancel subscriptions to online supplement deliveries. I am astonished, when I take a step back, at how many interactions are about monies. HOA group meetings are mainly concerned with budget. When these Boards approve services that are finally utilized, seeing tree trimmers or trash collectors on their job is because money was moved from one account to another. Those workers, then, are given funds which they then deposit into accounts, which in time gets transferred to another account and…ad nauseam. The process just keeps repeating, on any scale, cash or card. And at the end of the day I feel like a human wallet.
I feel like a symbolic wallet when it comes to money - of course because that is traditionally what wallets are used to keep accessible. But I also feel like a wallet when it comes to food: my body as the vessel/purse, food stuffs come in, hangs around other food, and then is deposited outside my body later. The kinds of foods directly effects the kinds of depositing of energy that happens later. If I deposit processed chemicals, modified starches, and sugars into my body “wallet”, the return on my investment becomes an unhealthy exchange of that energy towards others. The disease, discomfort, lack of health and vitality are the symbolic transfers which I am in charge of moving from one person/account to another.
It would be worth linking to see the connection between the food we eat and the movement of capital. If we are creating culture by forming society based on our how we spend money as our choices, then we are responsible for the Big Agrarian industries. Our purchasing power is a vote, it’s a voice, it’s the social currency we obtain, horde, and invest. Given the current health crisis related to Covid 19, it is paramount to examine the state of the bodies which are being affected. Chronic disease, stagnating life expectancy, immunity deterioration, inflammation, hypertension, diabetes and obesity are just a few afflictions wreaking havoc on the American and Global public. What the heck are all those illnesses doing in our life? Did we bring them upon ourselves?
We move money indirectly into our bodies. We are buying our health complications and our health liberations. If we use whole, plant-based foods as money in our human “wallet”, perhaps the exchange of energy towards others won’t be riddled with fear, anxiety, depression, and violence. We are not healthy, as over 40% of Americans are obese. That is NOT health. Our community, is NOT healthy. As Charles Eisenstein states in his essay The Coronation: “Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.” We are more sick now, and currently a virus is burning holes in our pockets. Our wallets are depleted, from money and from health. Counter to the standard American diet, the wellbeing of spending money on organic fruits and vegetables is long lasting. The health investment is a high-yield portfolio that cannot be taken by a virus. If we, however, spent our money on low quality, processed and highly refined foods, not only does the virus rob us of our physical wellbeing, but our low-yield portfolio of “health” disappears right along with it.
Now let us connect the way we invest our money to the health of the planet. Divestment is the opposite of investment - it simply means getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds that are unethical or morally ambiguous. Many people know that oil companies are funding extractive industries. They can be classified as morally ambiguous and/or unethical. The continued operation of these industries, by our demand, keeps the air polluted, the waters toxic, and our bodies at risk. Many people don’t know how to take on this massive monster that is Big Oil using Big Money to destroy the Small Planet. But we the small people of this small world have one big advantage: our money.
Our bank accounts, our portfolios, universities, retirement funds and religious institutions are all active participants in the investment and money market. These companies hold assets, and those assets are invested in stocks and bonds. Some of these institutions might not even know where their money is invested. But just like you manage your money and decide to buy a steak or a vegan meal, these big institutions hire investment managers to put their monies into Big Oil or Alternative Energy. If we, the people who own this money, pressure the institutions to divest from fossil fuels, then those institutions tell their investment managers and then divestment helps break the hold that fossil fuels have on our economies, governments and livelihood.
So ask yourself, are you in charge of your ‘human wallet?’ When you buy groceries, are the majority of products seemingly predetermined to contain subsidized, harmful ingredients? Is there a cultural bias towards certain foods, or are we subject to institutionalized doctrines, programmed through media outlets that benefit from selling certain goods? Regardless of the size of the store, most aisles have similar products, in plastic bags, with additives, marketed with bold colors and fonts. Who is your investment manager? Well, it’s you actually. You run your own “body bank,” the safe for deposited value in the form of food, water, medicine, thought and energy. Are you free to rebalance the value of your assets and investments, and perhaps reinvest in whole-plant based foods, alkaline water, non-toxic/narcotic medicine, affirming thoughts and confident energy? Or, maybe you and I are caught in the cultural tropes of meaning and goal setting that have guided us to making specific choices based on “free will.” If that seems like a stretch, consider that your mental state is a direct result of the invested ingest-ables you purchase with your money. You are a repository for products, and the more pure, diversified, and environmentally just your shares of ‘wealth’ become, maybe reinvestment of your worth becomes more attainable.
Perhaps we are not just pushes for dollar bills, runaway capitalism and pills. Maybe we are inherent and inalienable capacitors of human life, and the freedom to question, chose and progress is possible. It then might be possible during this Covid-19 pandemic, where the world has a pause, moments of silence, where we can reflect on the abstract and the concrete.