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Sunday, November 27, 2011

black Friday


I am completely appalled by the news I've been reading and seeing from the US. Black Friday. Yes it is black. It's as black as black can be when people shove, poke, trample and pepper spray each other for the sake of a few dollars off a wide screen TV or some other new tech toy.

What have we come to?

Let's start at the beginning. Christmas was created as a Christian holiday to celebrate the birth of Christ. I want to know if the people standing in line waiting for the Best Buy doors to open ask themselves "What would Christ do?" I suspect the answer would not be pepper spray anyone who tries to grab what I want to snag.

Jesus - remember him? He's the guy who overturned the money lenders' tables.

He should drop in again some day. I wonder what his take would be on today's money lenders - and the wealth of the churches set up in his name.

At any rate, we know that Christmas as been co-opted by big business in the most obscene possible ways - as has everything else in the world - like food and water and housing.

It's time to Occupy Christmas! How to do that? We need to step back and look at the true meaning of the holiday. It's about love and peace and giving thanks - and giving to those in need. It's about opening our hearts.

If we must shop, let's do it in a small way. Let's shop locally. And let's stop! Look around you - do you really need more stuff? Some people have so much stuff they have to rent storage units to contain it all. They never see their stuff but they sure as hell have to have it! We buy big McMansions to house our stuff - we go into massive debt so we can have stuff.

Please - let's get off this crazy roller coaster. The only reason we keep buying more stuff, especially at Christmas, is because big business spends a lot of money on advertising telling us we have to have this stuff. And then, recently, when people started going public with the idea of not buying more stuff, retailers called them un-patriotic - they were going to kill our economy. I beg to differ. It is the big retailers who killed our economy by shipping our well paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

I would also propose that an economy based on an endless round of buying more stuff is unsustainable - the s**t is already hitting the fan.

I won't be joining the fray this year. I have opted out for several years now and I will continue to do so. I will do my best to be part of the solution - not the problem.

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