The Cause: Buy Nothing Day

Buy Nothing Day is a Vancouver institution which has spread like a virus throughout our overworked, oversexed, overweight world. This year it falls on November 25th (relative to the American Thanksgiving, which is the unofficial kick off to the Christmas shopping blitz, and historically the busiest shopping day of the year).

Last year I made a huge banner and attached it gung-ho steez to the pedestrian overpass on the Stanley Park causeway then stood in the freezing cold for 3 hours handing out limited edition prints of my photographs and chanting catchy activist slogans such as "Consume Less! Live More!" and "Afflueza is an epidemic!" with my fellow activists. Yeah, yeah, I'm a harsh nerd. Whatevs. The year before that I won $100 from Adbusters for my idea to set up a coffee shop outside the dual Starbucks on Thurlow and Robson. I bought 15 pounds of organic, Fair Trade coffee, cleared out all the local thrift shops of ceramic mugs, printed out some stickers and leaflets, bought some organic soy milk and fair trade sugar, and voila! Anti-Starbucks with your very own customized Buy Nothing Day mug! This year, well to be honest, I've been kinda busy writin' this here blog, but I'm stoked.

Maybe this year I'll finally get around to staging a Shopaholics Anonymous meeting at Pacific Centre. Or I've always wanted to do a 'Whirl-a-Mart', in which you get a group of people together, find a Walmart (they're hard to miss), and set up a constant chain of purchasing and returning items (they have a guaranteed return policy)! Or if you want to avoid strip mall hell, buy the new dvd from the makers of Outfoxed called Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (just not on Buy Nothing Day!!). Or maybe I'll go bombing.

Why Buy Nothing Day you ask? Adbusters puts it like this, "For 24 hours, millions of people around the world do not participate -- in the doomsday economy, the marketing mind-games, and the frantic consumer-binge that's become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footprint and gain some calm. Together we say: enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course."

I can hear the chorus of skeptics now, saying, "How is one day going to change the world?" and the auto-reply "How is it not?". But largely I've come to understand that its primarily a symbolic event. Besides, if you can't even go ONE day without shopping, that shows you how intertwined our culture and shopping have become, and just how difficult it actually is. I mean, nobody is sitting at a desk on Wall Street monitoring how big of a dent BND made, its just more of a personal challenge to see how much our lives are for sale.

The other common refrain is, "But what about the economy?" Yes, what about it? Why does the GDP reward companies for cheating and scheming and stealing to benefit their bottom line, while ignoring the obvious damage done to the social, cultural, and environmental world? One of the main reasons I ran for the Green Party is because they espouse the benefits of triple bottom line accounting and would implement the Genuine Progress Indicator to more accurately track the true cost of things by factoring in what 'doomsday' economists call externalities.

For those of you interested the economic side of things, I urge you to check out BALLE BC. The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies is a a network of local business owners and leaders with a direct stake in the livability of our communities and bio-regions. Word.

But back to buying nothing. Have you ever been in Metrotown or Eaton's Centre or Metropolis or Super Super Fun Shop Shop Land or whatever it's called a week before Christmas? I mean forget Guantanamo Bay, if you want to torture someone, that is THE place. Holy shit. It is completely out of hand. I'm not a religious man myself, hell, I'm hardly a man at all, but wasn't Christ kind of like a lay-of-the-land type of dude? You know, "Give me neither poverty nor riches" (Proverbs 30:8) or "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well" (Matthew 6:33) and all that. And wasn't Santa Claus co-opted by Coca Cola? Weren't they the ones who made him red and fat?

One day. Come on. Do it.