Thursday, November 20, 2008
I used to find it irritating to see Christmas stuff this early. This year I was seeing stuff in mid-October. I wasn’t even thinking about Halloween yet in mid-October. I've been seeing Christmas commercials on television lately: basically Santa telling us to start buying stuff. I find the whole thing beyond irritating. It's offensive, even possibly immoral. I’m becoming less and less tolerant of commercialism in general, even before the current economic crisis.
There’s a documentary called What Would Jesus Buy? It follows this guy, Reverend Billy, and his choir on their cross country "crusade" to spread the "gospel" of not shopping. I don't think he is a real reverend but more of an activist. The way that we live, you can't really get along without buying some things. But we're not just addicted to oil in this country. We're addicted to buying stuff. Mostly stuff we don't need. There's nothing really good about buying stuff.
Why isn't someone saying, "Hey you don't have to keep buying so much crap!"? Why can't we just make corporations be more responsible: make things that aren't gonna break down and need to be replaced in a year when the warrantee expires? Make decent quality stuff we actually need, and a few nice special things for fun and whatever, but stop with all the crap. What have we as a people become, that we've let this happen?
There’s a documentary called What Would Jesus Buy? It follows this guy, Reverend Billy, and his choir on their cross country "crusade" to spread the "gospel" of not shopping. I don't think he is a real reverend but more of an activist. The way that we live, you can't really get along without buying some things. But we're not just addicted to oil in this country. We're addicted to buying stuff. Mostly stuff we don't need. There's nothing really good about buying stuff.
Why isn't someone saying, "Hey you don't have to keep buying so much crap!"? Why can't we just make corporations be more responsible: make things that aren't gonna break down and need to be replaced in a year when the warrantee expires? Make decent quality stuff we actually need, and a few nice special things for fun and whatever, but stop with all the crap. What have we as a people become, that we've let this happen?
