Yesterday’s paper came late. Guess it was too heavy. The thing weighed about four pounds, most of which was advertising for sales today, Black Friday, the first day of the Christmas Shopping season. Buy Now and Save! Celebrate the birth of the Savior by spending big, in herds.
We were at a house with TV for Thanksgiving yesterday. There on the flat screen I saw news coverage of people huddled on sidewalks, awaiting rain overnight and store openings in the morning. I guess those people are grazing on savings in those very stores right now.
One sane alternative is to join in celebration of Buy Nothing Day. It’s today in the U.S. and tomorrow elsewhere. BND is part of Adbusters‘ Carnivalesque Rebellion, the idea behind which is to “shut down consumer capitalism for a week”. Today is the culmination of that.
About Adbusters: “We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.” My work kinda fits that description, but my means toward the same ends are different. Adbusters is at war with captialism, and I’m not. I just think that the demand side of the market has never been properly equipped — and that once it is, we won’t need the war, because the system will reform itself. We’ll discover that it’s possible to prosper and improve our lives and the world by actually relating, rather than by controlling from one side or rebelling from the other.
But, each to their own. I’m glad Adbusters is out there and has a sense of humor about what they’re doing. And hey, think about how much you’re actually saving by spending nothing today.
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