Ideas and Revolution

I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving today and eats well since know I will be this year. The girlfriend and I will be going to her brother’s and we are going all out this year since with the economy going the way it is next year we may only be able to afford to feast on cold cereal.

Now, most people will get up early tomorrow and try to take advantage of good deals and shop all day. I think people who get in line at 11 PM the day before stores open are not buying for other people but mostly for themselves. I have never felt the need to battle with the crowds on the day after Thanksgiving so would never buy anything myself. Little did I know what I did informally was being done by social activists for years in protest of our over consumption and called it Buy Nothing Day.

It’s now an international event but was founded by Vancouver artist Ted Dave in 1992 and subsequently promoted by the Canadian Adbusters magazine. The event is held in North America every year the day after Thanksgiving or Black Friday. The point is not that buying nothing on one day will make a difference but that we think about how our consumption effects everything everyday.

Last year Adbusters created a commercial to make the public aware of the cause and to buy nothing. Oddly in our free society of ideas the big corporations would not take their money to air the ad on any of their TV channels. Apparently the concept of taking a day to buy nothing and think about our consumption habits is controversial. CNN did end up airing the ad at the last minute which you can view in this video…

The media giant even interviewed Kalle Lasn of Adbusters to explain Buy Nothing Day and the social, economic, political, environmental, and even psychological side effects of our over consumption.

This year I don’t know of any commercials that Adbusters has produced but Neil Boorman did a short film for the cause on our role in the system titled the “The Good Consumer” which is a must see…

How about not only on Black Friday but for the whole Christmas shopping season we take a break on our credit cards and the interest we can’t afford to cut back on shit we don’t need for ourselves and only buy reasonable gifts for family and close friends. We need to get back to the real theme of this time of the year which is spending time with family and friends and creating good will toward others. Does buying stuff we don’t need ever really make us happy anyway?

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