by Revlindsay King

Created on: August 26, 2010

HOW, USING COMMUNITY CURRENCY, I SURVIVED THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF 1930, IN A MINING TOWN

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Born in 1930-the seventh of what later became eight children-on Bell Island, Newfoundland,  www.bellisland.net  a mining town of about ten thousand people I, as part of a family of miners, experienced the Great Depression, head on. As miners, we lived from paycheck to paycheck. Because of the depression economy, half-time employment was the normal. This meant that the paychecks often did not cover expenses. It also meant that to make up for the loss of pay we-my father and four older brothers (only two had jobs)-had to find other things to do during the days not spent in the mines.

Looking back, I now know that I learned something about the nature and function of money and what it means to earn a living. The time we spent fishing cod, salmon and the like in the water around our island; the time we spent building boats, knitting nets, repairing the house, cutting each others hair, mending shoes, planting and caring for gardens-even making clothes, were our ways of providing the things for which we did not have the cash.

Later, when I became a minister and saw how devastating unemployment was, especially to the lives urban families with mortgages, I decided to do some serious reading about economics.  

Economists usually point out that money, generally speaking, has no intrinsic value; that it is basically just a medium of exchange. Eventually, this led me to read Marshall McCluhan's great book, Understanding Media (1964)-extensions of man. Based on what I found in Chapter 14, on the nature of money, I wrote and essay: MONEY, AS PERCEIVED BY MARSHALL MCLUHAN-an essay on his understanding of the political economy-and what he failed to mention. Interestingly, he defined money as: THE POOR MAN'S CREDIT CARD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Makes sense, doesn't it? If you were a merchant and a poor man gave you, a dollar bill, providing it was not counterfeit, you would accept it without question, wouldn't you? However, if he gave you a credit card, you would swipe it to verify he had real credit.

In his book, McCluhan points out that Samuel Butler, in his book about utopia, EREHWON (which backwards spells NOWHERE) refers to money as a type of sacrament-an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. It is a social medium which you and I can

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