Buy Nothing, celebrate nothing.

Our economy is already at all-time lows, why should we have a day where we just decrease it more?

Buy nothing day: less expensive than Christmas; not as fun as Halloween; maybe a little more important than Arbor day but just as plain. They couldn’t even find a better name for it either. Who would be dull enough to actually follow this holiday? There are people who do follow this holiday; they believe it will help prevent waste. The next day though, you will probably see the same people with twice the amount of groceries, kind of a waste right?

I’m not going to lie to you folks, I did not know about Buy Nothing day until it was brought up as a topic for my Mass Communications teacher. I looked more into it later on, and found this holiday to be, well, not really a holiday. Just don’t buy anything. Of course the people who support this holiday want to prevent over consumption, but people are sill going to consume, no matter what. It doesn’t matter how much we consume, we are still going to create waste, but….

What if the Media (in the right hands, of course) were to promote this holiday? Take Halloween for example: there are TV specials every October; Wal-Mart is always full of creepy décor; Costume King is raking in the dollar bills as we speak and it’s all because of promotion and propaganda…and we are all believing it.

According to P.T. Barnum, “There’s a sucker born every minute”; he was his own Press Agent back in the 19^th century and promoted that his slave Joice Heth was 160 years old. What is even more amazing is that people believed him, and he was gaining $1500 a week from eager New Yorkers. A great feat, if you ask me. He even wrote letters (under different aliases of course) to the editors of the New York newspaper, sometimes even calling himself a fraud or praising himself! Genius!

So, what if we promoted Buy Nothing day? What if we promoted it better than P.T. Barnum promoted Joice Heth?

We’d be putting Wal-Mart out of business if you ask me!

Keep following, internet junkies! Have a great week!

Work Cited

Stauber, John and Sheldon Rampton. Toxic sludge is good for you! Lies, Damn lies and the public relations industry. Canada. 1995