Johnny Farmer was a good man.   He had a kind heart and always tried to do right by the people in his life.  He was even kind to the strangers that he would occasionally encounter as they passed through his farming community and the nearby town.

He would help strangers who were stranded.  Everyone who knew him saw him as a ‘Good Joe’.

Johnny Farmer was not a worldly man.  He believed in God, family and raising children.

Of course, he believed in earning his living from farming the land and raising livestock too.  He was proud of his connection with the Earth.  This is the kind of connection that only those who work the land for a living and have a spiritual sense about them can feel.

All-in-all if you were to measure Johnny Farmer by most ordinary standards, his chance of having a joyful afterlife would seem to be high.

One year, the farm ran into a little trouble. They had bad weather that year and the farm just couldn’t produce enough to make ends meet.

So, Johnny did what many farmers did when they had a little trouble.   He went to see the local banker in the nearby town.  His town.   This was the town he grew up next to.  He went to school there and married his high school sweetheart in a little church in that town.

Now, to be fair, we must not blame Mr. Rogers, the banker, for what was about to happen to Johnny.   Mr. Rogers was just following the policies of the banking corporation he worked for.

These were established banking procedures and methods that have been around for a long time.  Mr. Rogers was just a worker for that banking corporation.

Banks like this one have share holders.  The pressure to make money is often high in that type of situation.

Anyway,  Mr. Rogers was happy to loan Johnny Farmer some money.  He was glad that he could help out his old friend that he had known from the time they grew up together.

According to banking policies, Mr. Rogers had to make Johnny Farmer sign a form saying that his farm property would be used as collateral in the ‘unlikely’ event that he should default and not pay his loan back.

Johnny had no problem with that.  He was sure it would be no time at all before he had that loan paid back.  No big deal.

Johnny didn’t know much about ‘financial systems’  and how they worked.  He worked on a farm and he really had no need to know about such matters.  His education did not include much on this topic either.

Mr. Rogers understood a little more, because that was his profession, after all.  He had a vague sense that the way ‘the system’ worked was very cruel and unfair.  But, like most people he thought there wasn’t much he could do to change things.  That’s just the way things were!

For example,  he knew that the money he was loaning Johnny Farmer wasn’t ‘real’ per se.  He understood that banks were ‘allowed’ to lend out far more money than they actually had on hand.  This is just the way ‘the system’  worked.

The fact that banks were allowed to create money ‘out of thin air’ like this was something that he thought about sometimes.  But, that’s just the way things are and have been for a long time.  Everyone excepts it, why shouldn’t he?

Well, the farm ran into more trouble the following year.  The interest on the loan grew bigger with each passing year.  This made the loan itself even bigger because sometimes Johnny Farmer had all he could do just to pay the interest on the loan, let alone the principle.

After about ten years went by, the loan had grown quite a bit.  Mr. Roger’s supervisors, who were actually from other parts of the country and had no connection to the local area, were reviewing Johnny’s loan one day.  They told Mr. Rogers that he would have to foreclose on Johnny’s farm so that the bank could recoup ‘its’ money.

Poor Mr. Rogers.  He had to actually go to the property and tell Johnny Farmer that he would have to leave because this land belonged to the bank now.

They had been long time friends but it seemed like this was something that few, if any, friendships could survive.  Mr. Rogers knew that he lost a good friend.  But, he couldn’t go against bank orders.  The bank would just fire him and find someone else to do the deed.  [Pun Intended]

Mr. Rogers went home after that in low spirits and laid in his bed reflecting on what had happened.  He thought how unfair and morally reprehensible it was that the bank loaned ‘fake’ money in the first place, money that didn’t actually exist.   Then, they took away REAL property that actually did have value in exchange for that ‘fake’ money.

The irony and evil of this struck him hard that night.  He had thought about these things briefly in the past.  But, never had the reality hit so close to home for him before.  What happened was just plain WRONG.

Mr. Rogers was very sad.  You can imagine how Johnny Farmer, his wife and children felt.  This was awful.

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