AlterNet: Buy Nothing Day This Year

November 29th, the day after Thanksgiving, is United States Buy Nothing Day. This shopping holiday is November 30th in Europe.

While Buy Nothing Day is primarily about getting people to think about the impacts of their conspicuous consumption, it's also a holiday celebrating personal liberation. One British Buy Nothing Day activist explained, "you'll feel detoxed from consumerism."

For many people, consumerism is an addiction. In the United States, the average household now pays $1,000 per year in interest and fees servicing a credit card debt that averages around $7,000. The average American generates one to one-and-a-half tons of trash per year. Municipal governments in the United States pay approximately $25 billion to landfill, incinerate or otherwise dispose of last year's motion pigs and other assorted pieces of trash. Our highways are abuzz both with Wal-Mart trucks bringing garbage to the market, and municipal waster haulers, taking it to the landfills.

In order to pay for this consumption frenzy, Americans now work longer hours than our parents did, and longer hours than our counterparts in any other developed country, while saving less money than in any recent generation. We've seen consumption-driven tax revolts, which put more consumption power into the hands of the upper classes, while starving public education, social services and the arts. Consumerism is poisoning our very ethos.