From midnight to this morning, I received about a dozen emails advertising sales of the day. These were from organizations who also have stores (National Geographic, Smithsonian, National Wildlife Federation, The Nature Conservancy) and from a few good retailers (Gaelsong, Barefoot Books), plus a couple of utilitarian entries (printer paper).
Having waded through my email, I turned to the news. In Long Island today, a man was trampled to death in a Black Friday rush at a suburban Walmart. People were so crazed for “door buster” deals that they literally busted those doors, and broke apart life for the temporary worker who was doing maintenance at the store.
If I had planned to buy anything online today, that would have settled me against it.
America is in a deep recession. We are profoundly in debt, wildly out of whack with our environment, our wealth is concentrated into a very small avaricious class, and we don’t have enough time to be with our families, to be ourselves.
Everyone one of us needs to join in reconceptualizing economics. We need to start thinking very differently about life, physical things, human objects, the earth, time. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as WD-40, spraying ourselves onto the machine as grease for the gears of a bullish Wall Street.
We have gotten so far from our food that we don’t know how to assess if there is enough to go around. That ought to be each community’s most basic comprehension — where do we get our water, where do we get our food, and is there enough to support and sustain our small bioregion through the long winter, and the rest of the year?
In reality, we have little, because we don’t know how to feed ourselves. We may have stuff, but you can’t eat stuff. And so we wax and wane with the GDP and economic fluctuations of big business and banks, because we have tied our very survival (food and drink and safety) to elements that are not only outside of our control, they are entirely outside of our sight range.
I invite us all to make today a Green Friday, or a Harvest Friday. To make a tiny step today, and then tomorrow, and the next day, on knowing local water, food and habitat. To understand a little bit more about our specific community - in its human and non-human, structural and transient elements.
To get a little closer to comprehending what gives us life, right here, now and tomorrow.
