I continue to marvel at the upside-down world we inhabit.
The most recent somersault: You can’t pay with cash.
K-State is enacting that policy this school year for ballgames. Want a Coke at halftime? ‘Scuse me, a Pepsi? Sure thing, but if you try to hand over a fiver, it won’t work. They will not accept legal currency.
You will be required, instead, to hand over a small piece of plastic. Or, to be more precise, you won’t hand it over – you will just wave it at a little magic gadget. You can also just wave the gizmo you keep with you at all times that somehow stores the information from the little piece of plastic.
Truth is, strangely, it makes total sense. Everybody has these pieces of plastic and these gizmos, and everybody knows how to use them. And nobody likes to get stuck in line behind a person fumbling around in their pocket for loose change. Or worse, writing a check.
Come on, man. Get with the program.
The plastic and the gizmos work much faster, and that’s key in situations where people are waiting in line.
I try to imagine explaining this to the person I was in, say, 1979, with my Union National Bank bag full of cash after collecting on my paper route. Wait. Huh? These dollar bills don’t count anymore? What?
I suppose it would have had a certain appeal, had it meant I didn’t have to go out banging on doors along Hunting Avenue, dunning my customers once a month. The money could’ve magically showed up in my bank account. Cool!
But the feel of that money, the smell of the cash, the weight of it in my pocket — that meant I had earned something. It meant independence and power and… responsibility, I guess. And it was the only thing universally accepted as a means of buying something. I was deeply psychologically invested in the meaning of cash.
We all were, for at least a century.
Which, if I think about it now, is entirely made-up, too. They were, and still are, simply pieces of paper. The only reason they have value is because we believe that they do. Which, of course, can disappear pretty quickly. Maybe in another generation it’ll be totally weird and backward to imagine a world where we ever had that belief.
Before cash, it was gold and silver. Which, while they’re tangible and inherently in short supply, are really no more magic than pieces of paper. Or credit cards. Or retina scans or thumbprints or anything else. All that matters is that we all believe in it.
Woulda been hard to tell this to my 1979 self. But now? Yeah, I get it.
Mostly.
