I can empathize with many of you who feel your Accounting and Bookkeeping was beyond your grasp. There was a time when it was foreign and confusing to me too. Thankfully, that time has past, and hopefully I can share some insight, some memory tricks, and a few paradigm busting tools which might enable you to bust through your own accounting fog too, if you so choose.
During my journey from accounting newbie to my current understanding, I was shocked at what I discovered about our Accounting Education System. It's no wonder most are Accounting Illiterate, as the system was setup to achieve illiteracy, not understanding. Such a simple concept that has been summarily discounted by all the logical types, but one that is falling under far more scrutiny by the day now, and that's what makes these very exciting times in-deed!
Accounting isn't as difficult as the masses have been lead to believe.
It's only additions and subtraction with an occasional amount of multiplication and division tossed in from time to time.
You had all the basic tools to do accounting before you were 8 years old.
Who knew, right?
So what went wrong?
They did.
It's not what, and it's not you.
It's who.
I'm not going to tell you who they are as I'm still enjoying the discoveries myself. I'll tell you a bit about what happened as near as I can tell, but I'll only be able to sprinkle it in because you wouldn't want it any other way.
We all got duped and gypped with our education. That's all it was in recent times...
- We can't blame it on our teachers or parents because they got duped and gypped too.
- From facts and vague personal interactions, it seems the current flavor of Accounting related duping and gypping dates back to the creation of the FED in 1913. But it goes back way beyond that.
- The Free Banking Act in the 1860's was anything but free. Those little devils love to use contradictory words for sure.
- Keep back-peddling to the Second Bank of America in the early 1800's and a short and odd war preceding that, and then fall back to the First Bank of America and a decade prior that was filled with counterfeiting -- and it's then you get a better feel. That Hamilton fellow was not the hero Broadway is depicting him to be today, btw. I'll try to leave my personal feelings and yours out of this for now because we have more interesting things to discuss!
- If we keep going back through centuries and then a millennia or two, we can find Accounting related games (aka Commercial Games) around the time of Christ (assuming he existed), and if we go further back, we find this place called Babylon. Ahh yes. Babylon. I am more a fan of Sumeria, but let's focus on Babylon.
- From a Babylonian perspective, some might admit that getting duped and gypped was part of the experience we've all wanted to explore in a odd and mysterious way, albeit it's most assuredly gotten far more than a bit or two out of hand IMO.
No matter your thoughts on Sumeria, Babylon, duping, gypping or them, we have some exciting, new Accounting opportunities to explore because it's now time to offer open source Accounting Education to the masses yet again!! Many won't want it initially as we didn't either, but sometimes, we all need to eat our broccoli and beets while watching rocks levitate too!!
If we are to have honest conversations about Funny Money Tree Farmers, Trillions in "Debt", Debt-Slavery-Gone Mad, (Energetic) Cannibalism, Pedophilia, Sexual Liberation, Free College Education and Medi-Care For All, we simply can't do that without a higher level of Accounting Literacy in the Public Body!!
