Linnea Barklund's Blog
Buy Nothing Day / Jan 1, 07:26 PM
So on Buy Nothing Day (day after Thanksgiving, more commonly known as Black Friday) Ashley, Andrea, Sam, Melissa, Shawn (city director), Joe (from the East Garfield Park team), and I went down to Michigan Ave. early the morning to demonstrate against mindless consumerism that so often happens during this time of year (well, really anytime). We had had a meeting detailing what we were going to do a few days earlier, and had all these great ideas. First, we were going to get lots of nickels and draw hearts on them and give them to people to pass on to somebody else, and to try to get people thinking about the power of their money. And we were going to form a human chain and get everyone who would, to latch on and spread all the way down the street as far as we could. And last, we all got bright yellow shirts and wrote statistics on debt, consumption, poverty, whatever, and wore them over all our sweatshirts. Well, the only thing that happened like we thought it would, was the shirts. We did get the nickels, but most people didn’t take them, and the human chain never happened at all. We actually ended up splitting up because we felt that people might be less intimidated if there were smaller groups. And people were a lot less receptive than I was thinking they might be. But I did have a nice conversation with an older gentleman, who asked what we were doing and then we just started chatting, and then when he turned to go, he thanked me for being out there. And we met a street musician and his dog, Reba, who was quite cute. And there was another group of BNDers who were taking a very different approach. Pretty much telling people to stop shopping now and being kind of abrasive with a bullhorn, etc. But whatever. It was cool. And there were some people who just didn’t get it and didn’t understand what we were trying to do, etc. But that’s ok. We had fun just talking to people and handing out nickels and just doing what we wanted to do. But that’s just one example of something that turned out to be really different than what I was expecting, but still a great experience!
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it was a BLAST!
advertising a different kind of message…a good message!
it was such a freeing experience…just being out there and acknowledging people as human beings worthy of my time in the midst of the holday shopping frenzy. I like the dispersing we did. It grabbed attention and didn’t give off the ‘we are the cool group..come join us..be like us…not like you’ feel.
i’m glad we participated in Buy Nothing Day by not participating in the ‘gotta get more, have more’ shopping craze. But instead of sitting at home we were out with the people…sharing as they showed interest.
i had a great time advocating presence with people. =)
and that leap frog/monkey game was incredible, eh?
By melissa / Jan 10, 01:34 PM / #