Spendthrift

There are plenty of Facebook groups that don't get my attention, but some of them, like this one, are centered around a day or event, and since the Christmas season is nearly upon us, perhaps we should take a closer look.
Buy Nothing Day is exactly like it sounds – on Black Friday, masses of people gather to show that they have taken a stand against the mindless American consumerism that has swallowed the season, and prove that the same fate will not fall on their wallets. It’s the one day to not spend, but instead to think about it.

Well, I think they’re doing plenty of thinking on this topic. I started going through some of the pictures posted, and the conversations that were initiated below them. I started recognizing a lot of the liberal type folks who I went to school with, the English majors who do a lot of reading, writing and thinking (unfortunately, sometimes in that order). Artsy folk, some would say. They throw around authors’ names like Chomsky and suggest you read up on them sometime before you dare engage in any kind of conversation with them.

Ugh. Nothing like someone throwing around their academia roots to make you feel like crap. But this isn’t about what was being said, wholly, in this non-buying group; it was the conversation that followed between my husband and me over an IM conversation.

I was especially intrigued by one gentleman’s comment that if America’s economy and dollar were to crash, there would be a lot of Wal-Mart dependent addicts that would know nothing about sustaining themselves. Then I started thinking about the independent business owners in the country, the modern-day tradesmen of our time. These people have navigated Big Government and figured out ways to do their own taxes, find their own insurance coverage, hire their own workers. Those are the kind of people who, after enough sweat and blood, figure out how to manipulate the system to their advantage. A very small amount of these guys get rich in the end, regardless of the status of the economy. They can’t lay themselves off; they figure out how to float.

So, thanks to these independent entrepreneurs who figure out the system, do we owe our gratitude or scorn? In one way, these people (like The Donald, for instance) have built up their businesses and figured out ways to function in a system with ever-changing constants. It’s like trying to solve a math problem when the value of ‘x’ keeps changing. That takes an amazing amount of work, talent, a little luck, and a lot of contacts in the Blackberry. These people, believe it or not, have invested insane amounts of money and time and sanity, sacrificing everything except the oxygen in their lungs, to become who they are today. They build corporations that provide jobs and benefits to huge amounts of people, encouraging others to work hard and enjoy their money earned.

But, do we scorn these people who build businesses that encourage the rest of America’s bell curve into the corporate middle class, earning money that they will spend on things that provide absolutely no return, mere status symbols, who take that money and recycle it back into the huge corporate world? Do they prey on our vanity and entice us with their merchandise, telling us the only way we can ever be better in this world is to buy their brand?

One thing about this is interesting, indeed: If everyone had the guts to sell their home, exchange their cars for a winter beater, go into debt by taking out a business loan, move far away from home and invest in thousands into tools and office space just to further their own lives instead of being dependent on Big Money, then what would happen to our capitalist society? As the Buy Nothing Day folks see it, capitalism encourages the mindless, relentless advertising to buy product that gives nothing in return, and we need to sit down and think about the effects of that over-consumption.

Well, what if everyone stopped “buying" stuff and started “investing” in their education in order to learn terms such as "assets" and "liabilities?" Sometimes it's as easy as buying a book or a CD and listening to what these rich folks have to say. What if we snuck out of the work week mentality and started using our weekends to learn and not just go buy beer or go car shopping? What if we started thinking about the reasons why terms like J.O.B. (Just Over Broke) exist? What if we learned that we don't have to buy a bigger house with our raises, just like everyone else does?

Blame who you want. It’s scary what kind of cattle mentality has been bred into the American Homo sapiens.