Today is Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day, or maybe it’s Buy Everything Day. The Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, the Christmas season officially underway and very few people are at work, unless you work at a mall.
For the past several years, activists have been asking people to mark Thanksgiving Friday by taking a one-day holiday away from shopping. Last week, on the campus of the University of Vermont, a young man handed me a three-by-four-inch flyer which said Buy Nothing Day is set aside to protest “overconsumption and gluttony, relationships that revolve around stuff, teeming landfills, the rapid conversion of natural resources to trash and the social disease of consumerism.” That’s quite an agenda, and it sounds even more tiring than a day at the mall.
I’ll admit to having half a notion to kill the messenger. People who go off on anti-consumer rants often strike me as smug, self-righteous and condescending. They can sound as if they’re lecturing a seven-year-old to eat his peas because children are starving in India. Once I’ve recovered my equanimity, I admit I agree with everything they say, and then I hope I don’t seem smug and condescending.
If Buy Nothing Day accomplishes nothing else, it provides the American consumer an opportunity to think about how much we are buying all the time. There’s really no such thing as Buy Nothing Day for the 21st-century American. Every day we buy the rent or the mortgage and the gas bill, the insurance, the phone bill, the electric bill, the water bill, the garbage bill. Every day we pay for our cable access and Internet service provider. And on top of those, maybe the car payment and the health club membership. Don’t forget taxes, there’s always taxes and credit card debt. Americans owe over $600 billion to credit card companies, along with the periodic finance charges. That’s almost four thousand dollars per person. Everyone would like a Buy Nothing Day for all that stuff, if we could only get the battalion of creditors to go along with it. The idea of Buy Nothing Day, if I understand it correctly, is to realize this, to know that we are in a hole and stop digging, at least for a day.
But if we don’t go shopping, what do we do? According to national custom, we spend today – Thanksgiving – dwelling on those things for which we are grateful. Maybe we could start a tradition of using Thanksgiving Friday to act on our gratitude.
Since everyone’s home, we could spend time with our family. Since most of us will gorge ourselves today, maybe we can get some group exercise tomorrow. Al Gore and his family have been playing touch football on the lawn; George W. Bush has been out running and walking his dog. Each of these men would rather be out shopping for a cabinet, but they’re exercising. If you live in Vermont, you could make a snowman, or woman. If you live in Buffalo, you could shovel the driveway – again.
Adrienne uses this weekend to pull out all her clothes, sort through them and give away things she no longer wears, taking Buy Nothing Day a step further. I scour my bookshelves, hunting out books I’ve bought but haven’t read and pull out CDs I’ve bought but haven’t listened to very often. If worse comes to worse, I can always dive into the stack of newspapers beside my desk and clip the articles I meant to save and recycle the rest. It usually doesn’t come to that. I usually take a nap instead.
A long time ago, someone told me happiness is not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got. Happy Thanksgiving.
Stop Digging
Today is Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day, or maybe it’s Buy Everything Day. The Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year, the Christmas season officially underway and very few people are at work, unless you work at a mall.
For the past several years, activists have been asking people to mark Thanksgiving Friday by taking a one-day holiday away from shopping. Last week, on the campus of the University of Vermont, a young man handed me a three-by-four-inch flyer which said Buy Nothing Day is set aside to protest “overconsumption and gluttony, relationships that revolve around stuff, teeming landfills, the rapid conversion of natural resources to trash and the social disease of consumerism.” That’s quite an agenda, and it sounds even more tiring than a day at the mall.
I’ll admit to having half a notion to kill the messenger. People who go off on anti-consumer rants often strike me as smug, self-righteous and condescending. They can sound as if they’re lecturing a seven-year-old to eat his peas because children are starving in India. Once I’ve recovered my equanimity, I admit I agree with everything they say, and then I hope I don’t seem smug and condescending.
If Buy Nothing Day accomplishes nothing else, it provides the American consumer an opportunity to think about how much we are buying all the time. There’s really no such thing as Buy Nothing Day for the 21st-century American. Every day we buy the rent or the mortgage and the gas bill, the insurance, the phone bill, the electric bill, the water bill, the garbage bill. Every day we pay for our cable access and Internet service provider. And on top of those, maybe the car payment and the health club membership. Don’t forget taxes, there’s always taxes and credit card debt. Americans owe over $600 billion to credit card companies, along with the periodic finance charges. That’s almost four thousand dollars per person. Everyone would like a Buy Nothing Day for all that stuff, if we could only get the battalion of creditors to go along with it. The idea of Buy Nothing Day, if I understand it correctly, is to realize this, to know that we are in a hole and stop digging, at least for a day.
But if we don’t go shopping, what do we do? According to national custom, we spend today – Thanksgiving – dwelling on those things for which we are grateful. Maybe we could start a tradition of using Thanksgiving Friday to act on our gratitude.
Since everyone’s home, we could spend time with our family. Since most of us will gorge ourselves today, maybe we can get some group exercise tomorrow. Al Gore and his family have been playing touch football on the lawn; George W. Bush has been out running and walking his dog. Each of these men would rather be out shopping for a cabinet, but they’re exercising. If you live in Vermont, you could make a snowman, or woman. If you live in Buffalo, you could shovel the driveway – again.
Adrienne uses this weekend to pull out all her clothes, sort through them and give away things she no longer wears, taking Buy Nothing Day a step further. I scour my bookshelves, hunting out books I’ve bought but haven’t read and pull out CDs I’ve bought but haven’t listened to very often. If worse comes to worse, I can always dive into the stack of newspapers beside my desk and clip the articles I meant to save and recycle the rest. It usually doesn’t come to that. I usually take a nap instead.
A long time ago, someone told me happiness is not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got. Happy Thanksgiving.