As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, a small troupe of scoundrels including myself, Santa, and an elf, walked into a couple of Iowa malls in November, passing out “Buy Nothing Day” flyers to suggest an alternative to the overwhelming push to buy more on the then-upcoming Black Friday. “Buy Nothing Day” is a campaign introduced by Adbusters magazine to help draw attention to over-consumption in America. The front of our flyers displayed their graphic, and the back of the flyer (the text of which is reproduced on the previous blog entry) contained a bit of text that my brother Wesley and I wrote explaining what we were up to, why, and a practical alternative to spending more money at the mall: donating to Action Against Hunger as a way of taking care of the basic needs of those who are starving to death. For those things we do need to buy, we suggested referring to the Better World Shopping Guide, an inexpensive book that ranks companies by their ethical responsibility to both their employees and the environment.

While I’ve felt strongly about the issue of over-consumption for a long time, I’ve very rarely felt strongly about the act of protesting. In the past, those waving signs on street corners have often come off as obnoxious and therefore ineffective. The sorts of actions Adbusters suggested seemed to fall right into that category: running through the mall as a herd of zombie santas, plastering McDonald’s tabletops with stickers that say “grease”, etc. When reading these sorts of things, it often looked as though they were simply searching for ways to be ‘rebellious’ for the sake of fun, rather than for the sake of communicating with people about the supposed issues at hand.

However, while Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn seems to be off-target with his particular “solutions”, he does a pretty good job of pinpointing the problem which sparked them in his book, Culture Jam. He notes there the bizarre fact that corporations have the same legal rights as citizens in the US, even though they are comprised of many individuals with far more money than most have on their own. As a result, so much public space has been bought up by corporations that the loudest messages are shouted by the ones with the most money, which, of course, drown out those of the poor or frugal. For example, free speech is not allowed in the mall, which is a giant building where enormous numbers of people gather. Because we handed out flyers that suggested people “buy nothing”, we were threatened with arrest and barricaded into our parking place by a mall security vehicle until they decided whether or not they were going to let us go. Lasn’s general solution to this sort of power is to reclaim space by voicing the truthful messages of the poor wherever possible. By doing this, we refuse to simply bow to the messages of corporations whose ethics we don’t agree with (Wal-mart, for example) and rather than saying “Okay, you win, I’ll leave”, we step into the territory they have gained through their shady practices and demand equal voice for messages that are not in agreement with them.

In an abstract sense, this sounds totally reasonable, but the specifics of this idea’s execution (particularly many of those Lasn himself sees as good) are what troubled me in the past. So, when I began planning our own Buy Nothing Day action, I tried to figure out a way to revise the typical protester image to make it more effective. But despite this, I was still met with many frustrated responses from friends who heard about it.

One question I was asked by a few people is, “What’s the difference between you and one of those apocalyptic street preachers, shouting about the evils of homosexuality?” To me the commonalities are fewer than the differences, but because this question was repeatedly asked I thought it might be good to dissect it here since others may have the same view on protesting that I previously had:

- First, the topic we promoted and discussed is significantly different than those spouted by the stereotypical street preacher. Rather than getting upset about something people do in private (the supposed ‘evils’ of homosexuality) or telling people they are in danger of being hurled into a pit of fire, we are ultimately talking about something concrete that is happening right now and should be of concern to the general public: the starvation of our fellow human beings. According to several Web sites such as Advent Conspiracy and Charity Water, Americans spend 450 billion dollars on Christmas each year, which is about 45 times the amount of money needed to provide clean water to those in need. Yes, we are somewhat forcibly injecting this message into what some others might consider a peaceful environment, but the stakes are high enough and concrete enough that it justifies the mild interruption.

- Second, the method by which we talked about this was by dressing up in light-hearted costumes and passing out flyers to those who wanted them, having discussions with those who were up for it. Those who didn’t want them were left alone. Rather than accusatory statements, the flyers simply stated facts and suggested action based on them. This is a drastic change from someone shouting judgmental statements at passersby and threatening them with a bath of hellfire if they don’t agree with you.

- Third and last, the message we ‘preached’ is not something America has been as ridiculously over-saturated with as “Believe in Jesus and get saved!” On the contrary, television, radio, billboards, buses, and more are filled with the “buy more” mentality, particularly around Black Friday.

From my current standpoint, this all seems obvious, but I realize that at one point I despised protesting about as much as the guy who invited me to “Stop Being an Agenda-Pushing Faggot Day” after hearing about our mall escapades. Fortunately, the voices of disdain were far fewer than the voices of support and the number of productive conversations that arose from it made the entire thing well worthwhile.

Photographs by Jacob T. Westrum.