Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Thoughts fill with the images of friends and loved one’s gathered around the dining room table. There will be the sharing of good food and good conversation. Afterwards, many of us will sit back, stuffed and happy, and fall asleep on the couch in front of the television. Others will go outside and toss a football around. Heck, maybe we’ll even play a little dominoes. A day filled with the joy of hearth and home that warms the heart.

Then comes the day after. Aptly named “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving many Americans will swarm to the stores to go on a buying binge. In some major cities people even line up outside the stores over night. We’ll spend millions of dollars, mostly on credit, at stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, and the numerous mega-malls around the country.

Black Friday is also a big day for the corporate news media. Reporters will loiter around the stores to video tape shoppers as they stampede through the opening doors, pushing and shoving each other as though their lives depended on it. The TV stations will consider themselves lucky if they catch a shot of an elderly person or child who falls during the stampede as people mindlessly stomp on them. Plus, they always build it up as such an important event that, according the newscaster, the very fate of our nation rests on whether we will show up and spend. “Go out and shop for your job depends on it!” they’ll exclaim as they show scenes of the crowded parking lot taken from the helicopter hovering over the mall.

But there is another way to spend the day after Thanksgiving. Sponsored by Adbusters, November 28th, 2008 is also known as “Buy Nothing Day.” Rather than being another lemming at the mall we can do something else. Stay home. Go for a walk. Read a book to a child. Volunteer at a charity.

Don’t let the capitalists and the corporate media control you. Rather than participate in Black Friday join me in Buy Nothing Day instead. You’ll feel better that you did.