You Cannot Eat Money
An Essay for a Country That Still Doesn’t Get It
By Dean Alonso
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the problem isn’t that Americans don’t know.
The problem is they don’t want to know.
They want the warning, but not the wisdom.
They want the prophecy, but not the price.
They want to be left alone—by truth, by consequence, by their own children’s future.
And so, once again, I find myself looking out over the scorched acres of denial and whispering a line that’s been passed from people with actual wisdom, to a nation with infinite excuses:
“When all the trees have been cut down,
When all the animals have been hunted,
When all the waters are polluted,
When all the air is unsafe to breathe,
Only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”
– Cree Prophecy
It’s not subtle. It doesn’t need to be.
And yet here we are, building million-dollar beach homes on borrowed time, breathing smoke-filtered air and pretending not to notice that the birdsong is quieter, the summers meaner, and the water a little less trustworthy than it was just five years ago.
The Lie of Delay
America is addicted to the lie of delay.
“We’ll get to that after the election.”
“Once we get the economy back on track.”
“When we find a more balanced solution.”
No. You won’t. Because you don’t want to.
What you want is permission to keep doing what you’re doing—driving the truck, flying to Vegas, eating strawberries in February, and voting for whoever promises you’ll never have to feel bad about it.
And you’ll get that permission. We’re awash in it.
Fox News will bottle it. Your governor will tweet it.
The fossil fuel lobby will sponsor your moral shrug.
Because the truth is this:
You’d rather die of comfort than live in inconvenience.
And that is exactly what we are doing.
The Constitution of Convenience
This country will wrap anything in a flag—greed, cruelty, cowardice—and call it patriotism.
But tell someone to take shorter showers? To eat less meat? To ride a damn bus?
Suddenly you’re a communist. Or worse—a liberal.
We make gods of the marketplace, saints of CEOs, and martyrs of coal plants. And we punish truth-tellers like they’ve committed treason against the holy order of plastic and profit margins.
It’s all so nakedly pathetic I’m embarrassed to say I served this place.
Not because I didn’t love it. I did. I do.
But because it doesn’t love itself enough to stop burning its own house down for another quarter of GDP.
The Cree Already Told You
Let’s not romanticize the Cree prophecy.
Let’s just listen to it.
It doesn’t promise salvation.
It doesn’t say “maybe” or “if.”
It says when.
When all the trees are cut down.
When all the animals are hunted.
When all the waters are polluted.
When all the air is unsafe to breathe.
Only then—not before, not during—will you finally realize that you cannot eat money.
And that’s what keeps me up at night.
Not that it’s true. But that it won’t matter.
That we’ll arrive at that moment—thirsty, starving, breathless—and still believe there must be one more app, one more bailout, one more Elon-fueled miracle to pull us from the brink.
That we’ll turn to our children, hand them an American flag soaked in oil, and tell them to be grateful.
They Don’t Want to Know
I’m done pretending this is a knowledge problem. It’s not.
We’ve had the reports. The charts. The “Code Reds.” The Hollywood dramatizations.
People know.
What they don’t want is to change.
Because change would mean reckoning.
And reckoning would mean looking in the mirror and admitting the truth:
That our way of life is unsustainable.
That our comforts are killing things.
That our culture—built on convenience, consumption, and conquest—cannot be maintained without sacrifice from someone else.
But we don’t like that kind of talk.
We prefer the fantasy where we recycle a bottle and get a gold star.
Where buying an electric SUV is a spiritual act.
Where we call it “carbon offsets” instead of what it actually is: moral laundering.
Last Word
The prophecy is not a threat.
It is not poetry.
It is not metaphor.
It’s just bookkeeping, a ledger.
And every tree, every animal, every poisoned stream is a line on that balance sheet.
We are almost out of lines.
So let me say this clearly, before the last one is drawn:
You cannot eat money.
You cannot drink your stock portfolio.
You cannot breathe in your Amazon Prime account.
And no amount of American exceptionalism, MAGA mythology, or red-white-and-blue slogans will protect you from the basic terms of life on Earth.
You are not above nature.
And if you act like you are, it will bury you like it has buried every arrogant empire before you.