Buy Nothing Day

Today is Black Friday. It's not a commemoration of a catastrophe or a day to remember our war dead. It does not give us pause to reflect upon a plague that has afflicted us or to ponder a collective tragedy that we have all witnessed. There is nothing sacred about Black Friday, it's another shopping day, but not just any shopping day: it is the biggest day of the year for retailers and the beginning of the Christmas selling season.

This day after Thanksgiving has become synonymous with rampant consumerism. Stores open before the crack of dawn (usually at 5 a.m.) and tempt rapacious shoppers with door-crasher specials and loss leaders in extremely limited quantities. Buyers show up in hordes, causing ridiculous traffic jams, waiting for hours in line, pushing and shoving their way into malls and crowding into the aisles of stores, clawing at merchandise and at each other in search of the ultimate bargain. It's ugly and there's nothing spiritual about this first day of the holiday season. But some people are trying to change that.

Buy Nothing Day is one such attempt at making a difference. Started in 1992 by Vancouver artist Ted Dave and then promoted by Ad Busters magazine, it was initially held in September but is now timed to coincide with Black Friday in North America, and takes the day after in the rest of the world. The simple premise is in its name and it is a day of protest and (in)action designed to encourage debate and reflection that will lead to reduced consumption and therefore a better environment.

"Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are band-aid solutions if we don't address the core problem: we have to consume less. This is the message of Buy Nothing Day," says Ad Busters founder Kalle Lasn. As a society of consumers rather than producers, we are often oblivious to the social and environmental impact of the products we use. In the agrarian past, our ancestors were intimately involved in the production of food and of the tools required to farm and to live. They saw the impact of agriculture on the land; they knew the blacksmith who forged horsheshoes and blades for scythes; they sheared sheep, harvested cotton and tanned animal hides to create the materials for their garments. We are nothing like that. Our food comes from industrial and factory farms; our clothes are manufactured overseas; our tools are engineered by experts and are far beyond our capacity to make them ourselves. Buy Nothing Day is an effort to remedy this disconnect and to remind us that our actions have severe consequences.

Another troubling aspect of this disconnect is our obliviousness to the full implications of the looming oil crisis. We feel the pinch of rising prices at the gas pump and we've experienced breakdowns in the supply chain post-Katrina, but we forget that petroleum is a key ingredient in the plastics used in most of our consumer products and fail to consider the impact of dwindling supplies on our consumer lifestyle. We also forget that oil powers the tankers and trucks that ship these products and that it will be increasingly in demand in emerging Third World nations that are taking over the production of the goods we consume.

Our collective amnesia is self-serving and convenient but it is also a defense mechanism. While we know this lifestyle can't go on forever, we feel powerless to change things. Every day we are confronted with news of accelerating climate change and increased environmental degradation but don't know what to do. Buy Nothing Day is a starting point for necessary change. It is not an end in itself but merely a pause; a break in the pattern; twenty-four hours of being different in the hopes of eventually making a difference.

Take this day and do what you will with it. Use it as a launching point for further action or to expand your knowledge of the issues in play. Consider ways to alter your habits. You may choose to extend the day and make this holiday season a Buy Nothing Christmas. Or you could buy secondhand gifts through thrift stores that recycle old goods and provide employment for the less fortunate. Or maybe you could put your creative talents to use and make your own gifts this year.

Perhaps it's time we stopped seeing selection as something that can be purchased in a mall and realize that we have more choices than we think. Whether you go shopping today or not, please take the time to think about what you're buying and what you're buying into.

Posted by Christos Tsirbas.

links:
Buy Nothing Day
Buy Nothing Christmas

http://adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/