Activists urge a day to stop spending

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – This holiday season, as officials urge Americans back to the malls to revive an ailing economy, one social activist organization has not relaxed its annual call to drop the incessant shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

For nearly a decade, Adbusters Media Foundation has relied on a network of local organizers and its own bimonthly magazine to spread the word about Buy Nothing Day (BND), which falls each year on the first day of the holiday shopping season.

On the surface, activists invite people to fast from commercial consumption by keeping their wallets shut and their credit cards idle for a day.

Wendy Luber (junior-agricultural and extension education), who has been posting BND fliers around Pennsylvania State University’s campus, said the alternative holiday also speaks to larger dilemmas about excess in America.

“The purpose of BND is to make people stop and think about the amount they consume and the amount that they waste,” Luber said in an e-mail. “What makes you feel like you have to wear Abercrombie & Fitch to fit in? Why do you need a new pair of sneakers, or a new stereo, or new car?”

Jack Ray, assistant director of Penn State’s Center for Sustainability, said the day’s goal matches fairly well with the center’s mission to promote responsible use of resources. He also said it was appropriate to target the date retailers and industry watchers call the busiest shopping day of the year.

“Black Friday has sort of come to symbolize the highest level of consumerism,” Ray said. “What do you really need? Try to go a day and not spend any money.”

Luber said she feels no less patriotic about supporting such an action, even at a time when finding holes in capitalism might be considered unpatriotic.

“I am so proud to be an American, but I think that we need to be fully conscious and aware of our citizenship to the global community as well,” she said. “I think that the American people would be better off in the long run if we learned to be a little more conservative in our spending as well as our waste. We cannot use all that we want for as long as we want.”

But Amy Glasmeier, professor of geography, who does research on globalization, isn’t completely convinced of the day’s effects.

“Something like this is great from a symbolic perspective, but has no effect on the global economic system,” Glasmeier said. “If it were to be widespread, in the short run, people would be harmed. (It is) better to work through a concerted program to change legislators’ views of globalization.”

As long as the Buy Nothing Day campaign has gone on and especially since the Sept. 11 terrorist acts, the campaign has been under attack.

It goes against President Bush’s call for the American people to spend like they have never spent before in order to help the fledgling economy.

The opposition is old news to the campaign activists, who have been battling with network executives for years.

“Every season we approach the networks to air the spot and every year they refuse us.”

Besides courting local activists, the self-dubbed “culture jammers” at Adbusters (www.adbusters.org) have crafted what they call an “uncommercial” to publicize their day-long moratorium, according to their Web site.

Three top TV networks – ABC, NBC and CBS – repeatedly have opted not to buy and broadcast the spot, but the Vancouver, British Columbia-based firm has found a forum on CNN’s Headline News. The cable channel is scheduled to show Adbusters’ Buy Nothing Day advertisement Tuesday at 7:06 p.m. EST, according to the Web site.

“Buy Nothing Day just wouldn’t be the same if the networks didn’t reject our pot-not-to-shop TV uncommercial,” according to Adbusters.

Jeremy R. Cooke, Daily Collegian (Pennsylvania State U.)

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