Black Friday rears its ugly head

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope all are enjoying good times with family and friends, celebrating the important things in life, our love for each other.

Amazing how quickly fine ideas become sullied. Christmas has been an overly commercialized holiday since as long as I can remember. Halloween, well, that is all about candy, right? Easter was somehow maligned to also be a mall holiday and since Thanksgiving is all about giving thanks for what we have I suppose the only way to properly hi-jack it is to assume that after giving thanks people realize that what they have isn't enough.

Somehow 4am sales on 72" plasma screen TVs is supposed to fix all that emptiness inside?

Well, I am not sold on the idea that buying things will make me happy (actually I hate seeing credit card bills, getting rid of those would make me happier) and so once again I will not be partaking in 'Black Friday' in the usual manner.

Oh, I will enjoy my train ride into work (minus the crush of the work rush), my relatively calm day at the office (lots of people on vacation) and a quiet stroll around Cleveland at lunch. I will also celebrate Buy Nothing Day, the annual "moratorium on consumer spending". There are many reasons. After suffering a flood and losing quite a bit of my material identity I have discovered that those things are not as important as I thought. I also have come to the realization that no one is really impressed by the junk I own and all it really does is tie me to a sedentary lifestyle, locked in a single locale due to the massive amount of things I have accumulated. In fact, I find the more things I 'own' the more trapped feeling I become.

Even if it not all about the accumulation of 'stuff' there is something downright uncomfortable about 1/5 of the world's population consuming 80% of it's resources. Is our consumption based society to blame on our current economic, health and enviromental crisis? Damn straight it is. Do something interesting this Black Friday; read a book, talk to friends, enjoy the outside, draw, paint, enter architecture competitions, work on school assignments, think. Think about what a difference you could make if you really wanted to, then make that difference.