Long ago I remember seeing a reprint of a political cartoon from the turn of the century, which used an image of an octopus as a visual metaphor for the many inroads, economically and socially, that the ‘Robber Barons’ had established to extend and solidify their stranglehold on America at the time.
Although the control they wielded partially collapsed along with the stock market in 1929, some were better positioned to survive, while others even prospered during the depression, rebuilding and establishing a renewed regime of influence and dominance over the ‘underprivileged’.
This has incrementally grown to phenomenal heights, thinning the ‘pecuni-air’ for most of us until we are nearly asphyxiated, while providing them with an ‘oxygenerous’ environment that has expanded their predominant mastery over all else — on a scale unmatched since the Jurassic era, when dinosaurs were able to reach fantastic ‘thundering’ proportions.
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My life has been creative-chaos lately and since hearing about No-Buy-Friday, I’ve been unable to find the time to become better informed about it, relying on trustworthy hearsay instead.
I remembered the boycotts of the 60s and simply followed suit, by being prepared to spend nothing on the 28th, while busying myself with composing a diary in support of it. The-gift-of-No-Buy-Friday
Fortunately, a comment was provided to that diary, in which ‘eeff’ made clear the need to continue buying from small local individually owned businesses.
This made perfect sense as it reminded me that they present the only viable alternative to purchasing from the behemoth corporate ‘octopie’, under whose predatory shadow they quake.
So I have personally adjusted my tactics and when necessary will buy on Friday, but only from ‘Mom and Pop’. I will exercise judgment in my choices, as I always do to avoid as much as possible harming the environment or feeding into indirect support of the forces that are undermining democracy. Image: Shutterstock
Although the underlying causes for the 60s boycotts differed to a certain degree from No-Buy, as then the target was the corporate war machine, they both share at their core the need to push back on the excessive and destructive demands of wealth and power, which drift in a sea of cognitive dissonance. Concurrent with the war protests against the ‘establishment’, was a cultural movement reacting to our increasingly mechanized and impersonalized lives. It focused on ‘arts and crafts’ and organic living, which had a clear antecedent in the late Victorian movement by that name. A large part of suburban and urban American patronized this return to handcrafted objects and the products of small local farms and businesses, as well as recycling, repurposing, buying used, and a rebirth of interest in antiques.
This latter was largely due to a generational aversion to the 50s modernism of their childhood, as well as the attraction of nostalgia — lit by the glow of ‘simpler’ and distant times.
In order to reach sustainability, “we will need to cut consumption back to simple necessities, not what we’ve been brainwashed into thinking we need”. We will also need to engage in economic “degrowth” as our economies have become explosively bloated by the production of material ‘pre-waste’. The ‘New and Improved’ is engineered to seduce us just long enough to trigger consumer desire, but not to hold our interest. We quickly grow tired of its worthless shallowness and finding its ‘promise’ disappointing, discard it to move on with an ever accelerating turnaround.
To reverse this process, we need to break the cycle of excessive compulsive consumption to redirect our desires toward the more beneficial intangibles and riches of life around us, which we have largely abandoned for the false world of Internet escapism with its ever morphing novelty.
Choking off the flow of credit excess fattening the ‘dinosaurs’ of modern commerce and focusing our resources on the enabling of individual small businesses broadens the road back to a stable and more equitable world. Properly managed, environmentally sound, needs-based commerce provides us with the way forward and boycotts give us the means to stop and reverse course — avoiding the precipice.
