Recently, Ventura Blvd. in Studio City has been littered with dollar bills that have bizarre and mostly unintelligable rants scrawled along the edges. At least that’s what it seemed like as bill after bill kept turning up in planters or nestled in the cracks in the sidewalk. Most likely a person would not have “spent” these dollars without a message or purpose that they thought was important. But if they did have an ultimate purpose, then it was definitely lost on me.
Fast forward a few weeks to browsing comments on Myspace. A graphic of a dollar bill with the same sort of writing (only more focused and politically slanted) was posted on the comments section of a blog. It turns out it was from a profile called Dollar Disobedience. They are trying to create a new type of protest flyer, one that people “can’t throw away.” It sounds good in concept, and it worked to the extent that I took the time to at read some of what was written on the bill. But did it open my eyes to anything new? Were these few words going to change my mind about any of my convictions whether they be social or poltical? Probably not. And the fact that it is anonymous doesn’t help. In all likelihood when one has defaced currency they don’t want their name on it. I can’t say that I blame them. But if you aren’t willing to stand up and be counted for what you believe in, it doesn’t exactly foster an attitude of confidence in the ideology.
One of the bills that is being promoted on the site:
There is probably no formal connection between the dollar bills I found and the political protest bills that are currently being promoted on the internet. However, for all I know it could have been the same person writing all of them. All that is left is a bunch of vauge ideas that don’t have the credentials to be taken seriously. So then why should citizens care or participate with this movement that, in the end, is probably ineffective anyway?