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| Frank Bencomo Class of 2018 |
"How much a dollar really cost? The question is detrimental, paralyzin' my thoughts." -Kendrick Lamar
The above quote comes from a song in the 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly and was President Barack Obama’s favorite song of the year. It deals with the tale of a wealthy man who refuses to give a single dollar on to a homeless man on the street. The man later reveals himself to be god and announces that the price of that dollar is the wealthy man’s own soul.
I too have recently become trapped by the question of we’d give up for money. What’s the biggest thing you’d give up for wealth? Who would you trade? Would you turn your life over for profits? What if I told you already had? What would be your response then?
We live in a world where money is king. Recently, my cat Jack broke his leg in a fall. A vet came to us and told my family we’d have to pay into the thousands of dollars to help him or they wouldn’t do it. That is to say, a person n sworn to take care of animals, said pay me or I’ll let the cat suffer. Maybe, to a limited mindset it’s just a cat. We’re better to humans aren’t we? No, the first questions we ask when you come to a doctor are related to if you have insurance. We’ll throw a person into massive debt to save their own lives. We’ll charge for the ambulance to drive them and the pillow they rest their heads on. Regular access to medical care costs money. The solution if you don’t have it is to not go. When my grandfather left the world the hospital set a bill of above $100,000 for his last days. Treatment isn’t optional. It’s mandatory unless you want to die, and the system has set a price on your life. My econ class would have you say that’s fair if you value your life more than money you’ll do it, but that’s too simplistic. Few will choose death, the end for money they’ll never see, but many will be in suffering and debt. Many choose their major on the kind of money they’ll make. The majority choose the jobs that will pay the best. They shy away from that which they love to make some more dollars. We’ve created a society in which we barely see our families so we can spend all day working to build wealth that the vast majority of us don’t get to enjoy. In a sense we give up family to work all day. These things are a necessity to survive in this nation so I don’t condemn the many who do this including my family and myself, but I ask you why does it have to be this way?
I challenge us all to go for your real dreams. Don’t be the type of person who choose their life based on the profit margins. Be the person who spends a little more time with family. Be the kind of person who helps others with the skills they’ve learned. Break away from the norms. Choose kindness over greed. Choose love over money, because at the end of the day, we’re not taking anything with us. If you’re lucky you’ll get 70 years on this planet. Time is short and the difference you can make, the legacy you can leave, the change you can make is in the lives you touch and the generosity you show.
There will be those who say, you’re naïve, everybody’s in it to make a living. To those I say that I’ve never believed that making a more equal and humane world is going to come free. I know it’s going to cost us. However, I believe the cost of not giving this dollar is worse. The price we’ll pay for our greed is in lives, it’s in dreams shattered by people who didn’t get the means to achieve them, eventually it’s going to be in the corpse of a planet our industries left behind so their executives could live like kings during their brief time here. When the day comes and you have to choose a path, simply ask yourself, how much a dollar really cost?
Frank Bencomo is a sophomore McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He studies political science and physics.