Money, money, money – thinking about money all the time. Dreaming about lots of money. Thinking about making lots of money. In a hurry to make some money, by whatever means available. We live in a world in which money has saturated our lives. We are born, we are raised, we grow up, and everything about our lives seems to be determined by money. We have been made to believe and behave in ways that confirm all the time that money is everything!

Meanwhile we live in a very troubled world. HIV/AIDS, the Covid pandemic, the US and its NATO European allies war against Russia in Ukraine and the threat of a nuclear Third World War, hunger is everywhere, poverty affects the majority of us, unemployment awaits all those who need and are looking for work, a few, and very few people seem to have everything whereas the majority swim in poverty.

We are caught up in a mindless endless grind to find money, consume as much as we can, whatever it is we lay our hands on. The display of material wealth apparently is the greatest sign of success. Money, apparently buys happiness, and even love, we are made to believe. And so, we join the struggle to find money.

These days are both the worst and best days in the history of humanity, to be young. Worst days because everything seems to be a mess, for the majority of young people, very little actually makes much sense. And life is hard, for the majority of people. Money is very scarce. Best days precisely because even the smallest genuine act of kindness, gesture of respect, solidarity, of generosity, of love, yields the greatest appreciation from those who humbly accept these mercies. One need not be a genius anymore to breathe some life into despondent and desperately hungry people!

Sadly, these are also days it is far much easier to give up and give in to smoking, drinking, eating anything, taking dangerous drugs, satiating oneself with cheap dangerous sex thrills, consumption of mass-produced cheap mind deadening music, films and videos. These escapist behaviours condemn many young people to lives lived as a vegetable in an abandoned poor village garden.

The world is upside down. We first need genuine love for one another to live and work together to make money and create the wealth we need to enjoy life. We are taught, instead, that we must first make money and then we can easily find love and happiness. Our remand centres, courts, prisons and communities are full of people who actually decided to take shortcuts to making money, broke the law, and now they are guests of the government of Zambia that has no capacity to take care of its free citizens!

Every day we are inundated with news of politicians who only yesterday were strutting around, showing off their big cars, mansions and flouting money – now they are being invited to explain their wealth clearly suspected to be proceeds of crime. Trust me, such people did find money, and also imprisoned themselves! Many today wish they had not done what they did. Happiness is the last thing they have in their lives. Most of their bought love has since disappeared too!

It is in such a world, a world desperately in need of restoring the true worth of a human being as a knowing, respecting, caring, responsible, loving and truly happy being first before money, that boom, we have a government that has reduced everything about us to money!

These are the best days to search for answers to difficult questions. What is the purpose and value of human life? Why do we struggle to live? What kind of world do we live in? Why is it so hard to access the things we need to live like water, food, decent shelter, clothes, medicines, and social amenities for leisure and relaxation?

It is not unusual to hear it said that good stable marriage is for the rich and children are expensive. Raising a family is hell without a job and money. And yet we have come from a background where a large family was well regarded, more than wealth. Marriage was the basic organised entity for production of food and wealth. Love grew inside the marriage, not necessarily before marriage. The whole village community shared the responsibility to raise children. Our old people were living fountains of history and excellent child minders.

The US war against Russia in Ukraine will force all of us to sit up, think, and understand how what happens very far away directly affects us. Soon the prices of fuels, electricity and many foods will get out of reach of even the better paid workers. Already in the US, Europe and many parts of the world inflation, rising prices and shortages of oil, gas and food are making their populations very restless.

The rich people of the world represented by the US, the European Union and Russia, driven by their love for money, are fighting to divide the world among themselves, in order to control the money-making activities of the world. This war for money in Ukraine between the US and Russia threatens to burn the world with nuclear bombs; we are the inevitable innocent victims of their savage war for control of world money.

As for the US and Europe, they are not content with the slavery, colonialism, capitalism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism which over the centuries they have inflicted on billions of human beings on Earth, while developing and enriching their countries. Throwing all caution to the wind, they are mindlessly forcing smaller countries with oil and gas to rump up production for the to stop depending on Russian oil and gas, in the processes risking over heating the Earth and destroying it!

In this war armaments, oil, gas and food global businesses are reaping the highest ever profits, as Ukrainians and Russians kill each other. So profitable has this war become that we now know it will not end any time soon. The global money mongers are driving the war to its reckless conclusion even as billions of human beings are already paying a heavy price.
It is not supposed to be like this.

The propaganda by money rich people that money is everything has won. But they are wrong. Life, all life, is more important than just money and consuming things. We can choose to fight and free ourselves from the tyranny of money and that of rich people all over the world. And a new world could be born, a world of human solidarity, genuine love and happiness. Only then can no one would be left behind, poor.

If we all begun thinking as freely as possibly, about everything, questioning everything, rejecting all simple explanations of things because simple explanations hide the truth and replace it with money – the domination of money and the power of those with money can be abolished. And human life can be supremely important again.

Express your ideas, frustrations and anger – dream, talk, sing, paint, shout, scream, beat drums, play any music instrument to bring out the thoughts floating in your head! Express yourself, together with others, the world will discover that money is not everything after all.

We can change the world by rejecting simplistic explanations of complex things. Treat with contempt anyone who makes you mentally lazy by telling you the world is simple and you must be happy with very little!

The money system wins because it breaks people into very selfish, greedy, money loving and money centred individuals – this way we lose the power of human solidarity and empathy, of combining our thoughts, emotions and energies to get things done, to think together, to create ideas and make things and wealth to share among ourselves, as full human beings.

Young people, truly young people, are all people who dream and actively work for a world different from our current extremely troubled money dominated world. You may be less than 40 years old. If your ideas are all about defending the current money dominated ugly reality, you actually are, in truth, very old!

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