Thanksgiving is about just that — giving thanks. That’s what they tell us, anyway.
That must be why a majority of Americans have completely reduced that pesky day of reflection to engorging on massive feasts and cutting out after desert to stalk down bargains like some bizarro holiday hunter/gatherer.
Everyone’s seen enough local news stories over the years to know how people camp out all night to be first in line, and how sometimes those lines can get downright pushy. Sometimes fights break out, and at times, people can die from being trampled by callous, delirious shoppers. Yet no television is worth a human life. A red toaster with bagel and waffle features fifty percent off is not worth losing one’s humanity over. When did that stop being common sense?
Is it any wonder that our indigenous brothers and sisters do not partake in Thanksgiving? Not only has this country been stolen from first nations under fists of genocide for hundreds of years through violence and colonial oppression, but the holiday alleging to commemorate the pilgrims’ gratitude to Native Americans has cast away even that illusion for the sake of gluttony, blind consumerism, and capitalism. One cannot simply stay home and enjoy the holiday if one is not able to get whatever one wants, and at a whopping deal!
It’s true that many stores, since the advent of “Black Thursday” online last year, have taken to opening their stores earlier and earlier. To compete with the new online rush of sales on Thanksgiving, itself, retailers and malls across the country will now be open for part, if not all of the holiday, itself.
No time for giving thanks, spending time with family, or for enjoying a moment of reflection. Just keep working your under-waged jobs and shop, shop, shop! Forget appreciating the riches you already have, like running water, food, shelter. Forget perspective entirely and focus on what you need, what you want.
There are some who will elect to stay home on Thanksgiving and actually spend the holiday as it was intended — as a holiday, a break, a day away from the norms of consumerist America — a time out to, well, give thanks. Some will also, perhaps, choose to stay home on Black Friday, as well. Good.
And for those who find it distasteful for stores to open on the holiday, yet who will go on out and shop regardless in order to get the good sales, in order that they are not all gobbled up before one can get there, or would rationally choose to get there, consider that it is only by our decisions, individually, that we ultimately affect change en masse.
These stores will continue to open earlier and earlier. Soon, all the world will be Frankenmuth. None of them can compete with the online market. One pushes back a further day, then the other pushes back yet another, until all year we are constantly pushed to buy and prepare for all holidays, always, ad infinitum, into delirium. That’s the new American Dream — the corporate dream, but we need not cave to our least honorable denominator — our petty desire.
We can, instead, choose something else entirely. As some wise folks once asked, “But what about the workers?”
Look here to see who made the naughty and nice list.
Ethics of Consumption – cultural capitalism
