It's The End Of The World As We Know It! – And My Money's Vile!

Y2K.

The buzzword of 1999.

If you haven’t heard it, you’ve been living in the wilderness with no electricity or running water for past several years. If you’re a net junky, you know all about it. If you’re an investor, it has you more than a little worried. If you’re a doomsayer, you’re convinced it is the harbinger of the world’s end.

Wisdom, however, has a different view. I believe the new millennium will bring with it an end to the U.S. dollar’s dominance over the world currency market. “What?! Has Wisdom lost his marbles?” you might ask. Well, maybe. Bear with me though, and maybe you will understand my reasoning.

From the time our forefathers fashioned the first United States coins out of silverware they robbed from their wives kitchens, Americans have always loved and taken pride in their money. As a country we have spent a countless fortune designing, printing, and stamping our beloved dollars. The detail of the engraving and the overall artistic beauty have always been points of amour propre in our country’s history. Even as a child, I remember, my friends and I examined our dollars with a magnifying glass, in search of any secret that the green and yellow bills might divulge. We were excited to find the little red and blue fibers woven throughout our money, and it was with no little amount of conceit that I announced to my compatriots that I had found the legendary, long hidden owl peeking out from behind shield in the upper right corner of the one dollar bill (though some argued that it was a spider).

We have always revered our money, not for its value as currency, but more for its more intrinsic value of beauty. When other countries have been forced to spend cheap, ugly paper, we have been proud to spend our finely ordained fabric. We have always been proud of our “Green Backs”, even when other countries had begun to learn their lesson and start using more colorful decorative money. When a foreign traveler would question me about how we could tell the difference between our bills when they were the same size and color, I was always ready to show them differentiating artwork, unique to each denomination.

It has been this deep seeded respect for our currency that has allowed Americans, by shear force of will, to make the U.S. dollar the world’s most dominant currency.

“So what’s changed? Why does Wisdom think this is the end for our money’s ‘World Championship Title’,” you ask?

My answer? Our money has lost what differentiated it from it’s top contenders. It has lost that which elevated it in our hearts and minds to something we could love and respect. It has lost its art.

Simply put, the new series of American money, which made its debut in 1996 and is scheduled to be fully released in the new millennium, lacks character, artistry, and individuality. No longer does our money carry on its front and back the unique scroll work, or pleasingly intricate fonts that have graced our bills for generations. Gone is the finely ornate details that differentiated the denominations, allowing us to know at a glance what bill we were holding. The new bills are differentiated only by the central presidential portrait on the front, the real estate ad on the back, and the digits in its eight corners. Beyond that, they are virtual carbon copies of one another, challenging even those of us who handle cash every day to tell the difference between a $20 and a $50 while making hurried retail sales.

Every day I hear customers complain, “Man, that new money is ugly,” and, “Don’t those new bills look counterfeit?” I have yet to meet one person who was pleased with new design. Our new currency is, sadly, a badly conceived generic reproduction of what it could have been. If only the federal reserve had spent a little more time thinking about what our money stands for, instead of how to make it more modern.

As we’re now saddled with currency that we no longer respect, the top contenders have laid down the challenge and slapped us in the face with a white glove. That glove being known as the “Euro”. The European Community has stepped up to the plate with a consolidated currency, that, while being an economically ingenious idea, has something else that will make it superior in the coming millennium. Beauty. If you have seen the samples of this new series of European money, you know what I am talking about. The “Euro” is, in my opinionated opinion, the most beautifully designed currency in the history of the I.O.U. It is colorful, detailed, artistic, and represents the best of what Europe has to offer. Even their coins are jewels of ingenuity, while our new “shrunken head” quarters seem dim comparisons to what they used to be. The artistry represented in their money is something they will all be able to take pride in, to cherish, and to respect. It is that pride, as it was ours, that will allow them, by shear force of will, to propel the “Euro” into the top spot in our world economy.

Oh well, maybe second place won’t be so bad.

Oh yeah, happy new millennium.

-Wisdom

No related posts.