Happy Buy Nothing Day!

Aren't familiar with Buy-Nothing-Day?

In the states, this weekend marks a great shopping weekend, when everyone rushes to the malls for the sales to stock up on useless crap for the holiday season. As a Christian, I'm firmly convinced that our modern day version of Christmas has very little to do with the birth of Jesus Christ, and more to do with a cancerous-like consumeristic economy, so I'm all for it.

(Yes, I am still a Christian. I go to Church with my mom when I can and everything. I chose to be baptized when I was 13 as my mother doesn't believe in baptizing babies... However, I don't really believe in a supper angry white old dude in the sky, or all that bullshit catholic dogma that was created by man. Getting into my belief structure would be complicated...)

This is what I have listed as my religion on the Facebook...


Uh, but I digress. Buy-Nothing-Day is a movement started by Adbusters. It encourages people to buy out of the bullshit, and do something by doing nothing.

Once, in my George Brown Days, my friends and I walked through the Eaton's center trying to hand out flyers for Buy Nothing Christmas. They wouldn't let us put up posters any where... as a joke I stuck one to my friend's jacket in front of me. A spark of inspiration happened. We then covered ourselves in flyers... we acted as moving walls. As we walked around, people were curious and would talk to us, or read the flyers... then as US for the flyers. It was a little genius if you ask me. Marketing philosophy states that the best way to reach people is to get them interested themselves to search for information... getting people curious as to why the hell we were covered in paper did so. I can't seem to find the photos, but when I do I will show them!

Reverrend Billy from the Church of Stop shopping has some commandments for the day. Enjoy. I'll post the photos of us as billboards when I find them!

THOU SHALT
Forgive people, yourself and everybody else. We all shop too much.

THOU SHALT
Know your Devil. Shoppers are only dancing in the land of ten thousand ads. Consumerism is the system. Corporations are the agents of the system.

THOU SHALT
Respect the micro-gesture. Magicalize the foreground. Fore-go the plastic bag and grab that bare banana – Amen!

THOU SHALT
Practice asking for Sweat-free, Fairly-traded and Locally Made products. That's the rude that's cool.

THOU SHALT
Buy less and give more. Giving is forceful, the beginning of fantastic new economies.

THOU SHALT
Buy local and think global. Love Your Neighbor (buy at independent shops) and Love The Earth (walk to, bike to, mass transit to – the things you need.)

THOU SHALT
Citizens can buy or not buy, produce or not produce. We can change to a sustainable personal economy. Then corporations and governments will change.

THOU SHALT
Envision the history of a product on a shelf. Workers and the earth made that thing. Resisting Consumerism is an act of imagination.

THOU SHALT
Complexify. Don't be so easy to figure out. Consumers tend to regularize.
Shopping at big boxes and chains makes us all the same. Viva la difference!

THOU SHALT
Respect heroes of the resistance. A small band of neighborhood-defenders who staved off a super mall with years of protests? Beautiful.

It's our turn now. CHANGE-A-LUJAH!