November 4, 2011: “Move the money”

I have a Bank of America Mastercard. Any day now, I can proudly say, “had.”

The last straw, of course, was B of A’s decision to charge a fee for debit card transactions. C’mon! That’s just mean. So while the mega-financial institution recently rescinded this exploitive scheme, it’s still, “So long, baby!”

The switch-over was incredibly easy. I contacted Joe Grafton, head of LocalFirst, a Somerville-based agency urging all of us to, ahem, shop local, and asked him who issued credit cards around here.

Answer: the CPCU Credit Union. Started in 1928, the Cambridge Portuguese Credit Union’s Somerville office is  a couple of blocks from my house. (I’ve been using their ATM for years.)

For $25, I became a member so am now eligible for a no-annual-fee Visa.

A couple of days after I made the switch, a green and white Door 2 Door van—a free service for local seniors—drove past. Guess what was painted on the side of the van? Yup.  An announcement that CPCU sponsored this most-needed service.

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. 
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. 
And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, 
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; 
but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson—

We’re all deeply interconnected: “Move the money.”