north american holiday shoppers running out of control, bolting through store doors when then open, pushing, grabbing, pepper-spraying, all to purchase cheapo electronics and miscellaneous crap. the way i see things right now: collective positive spirit of ows - plus ten points; collective negative attitude of crazed black friday shoppers - minus 20 points. my opinion?
Consumerism is violent. The apologists for ads and products, life styles and brought-to-you-by media are disastrously wrong. The thousands of marketing confrontations that a person must get through daily are not persuasive, clever, or normal. The 50 foot-tall actor wearing a watch and grinning at me - is not my new best buddy, Amen? This is atmospheric assholishness…
This little film shows Tuesday's simulcast between the London and New York OCCUPY communities. I flew out to the encampment at St. Paul's Cathedral, and we sang the 99% song together, across the Atlantic - what a wonderful moment! That made the whole London visit worth it - when Londoners held up a sheet to show the Stop Shopping Choir from Wall Street.
Join critically acclaimed author, KtB editor, and OccupyWriters.com founder Jeff Sharlet and the unstoppable evangelists of anti-consumerism Reverend Billy and Savitri D for a discussion about religion and politics in the Occupy movement and beyond.(more)
The OWSers are settling into the nation’s prominent cities, and my thoughts are with them. Perhaps their many injuries don’t coalesce into a singular need for retribution, but that is not the character of the problem we face with the wealth distortion in the United States.
I, like so many others, am completely disenchanted by this consumerist, materialistic system that we call a culture. Unemployed for almost 2 years, I am passed over for jobs because I am "over qualified" to work in this black hole of a town. I don't even want the jobs I apply for. The money doesn't interest me but I'm forced into wage slavery by capitalism and debt.
What if there is a switch in our brains that Bond-like villains can flip with impunity, sending us into spasms of shopping? Horribly, this is now an American fact of life. Yes - corporate researchers have discovered a circuit in our brains that actuates our shopping.
Sometimes people come up to me and ask “The Church of Earthalujah...what is that? Is it a political rally? Is it a real church? Is it a comedy sketch? What is it?!”
There is a moment half-way through “Tweets from Tahrir” – the new tweet by tweet running quotation of the Egyptian Revolution – where the reader gets goosebumps. It’s when you realize, “I could do this. I could have my own personal Tahrir.”
There were hundreds of millions of Kindles and Nooks frozen in death, stuck on one page – “Why America Slept.” You can say one thing about us, we were a species that scribbled, texted, hologrammed and burst a blood vessel of pixels in the final years. Every last atrocity was broadcast virally. By 2015, every consumer could make a major feature film with a gadget fitted to the hand.
The Earth is inside us, rotating in there like a conscience. These freak storms tsunamis droughts and extinctions only confirm what we carry inside. Each of us knows that we will have to change some personal consumption in the next few minutes. It might be a light switch, a perfume, a heated pool or a bite of food. Here it comes!
There is a new sales campaign the Disney Company recently announced. Wall Street analysts talk excitedly about the “newborn market.” Disney representatives enter hospitals’ birth rooms with sales kits, trying to sell onesies with Mickey logos to the enthralled or scared parents soon after the baby cries for breath.
The labels we are taught to look for can be most deceiving. 'whole grain', 'organic', 'wheat', and the diet words, that change with the fads but somehow are seen on the same products: low-fat, low-carb, wheat-free...
Something broad and deep about human nature is deleted now. The evolution of fight or flight has been reversed, apparently. The most obvious crime, call it the Willful Ending of Life, is world-wide in its scale. Yet someone has persuaded us that reports of the earth’s death are greatly exaggerated. We listen for some message from the silent nation-states, religions, corporations, armies.
These last days here in Florida, I’m roaming around inside big groups of Americans who are singing together. Christmas carols. On Christmas day itself, something about the words in those songs stopped me. Lines like “Joyful all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies!” and “The stars in the sky look down where He lay...” "And heaven and nature sing!"
On Black Friday/ Buy Nothing Day – we enjoyed our annual turn on national television, cutting into the heavy-breathing shopping reports with our alternative Christmas. A comment like “But if we stopped shopping – what about jobs?
Crunched shoulder to shoulder on a cold bench in The Tombs, with the courtroom hundreds of feet above us on the surface of Manhattan, up there beyond the reach of these hundreds of African-American and Hispanic men. Well, there was me, and then a couple guys who looked like elderly Keith Richards, but without the money to replace their blood.
My feelings are like
felines
That devour the totality of the truth of my being
Regurgitating things that feel like they're lying
To my one true self
Still eye need
Still eye want
The seeds are sown, slowly groan
Guarded by the avant in poem
So my Friday is painted Black
Ammunition for my inhibitions
Seeking salvation on a shelf
Best Buy sells the best lies
Grok this to send it to the top of the Blog Feed for Black Friday!!!
Not As Lazy As You Think is a group blog with a primary focus on pop culture, politics and humor and with occasional jaunts into more serious and pedantic matters.
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
