Many people are missing the point. Buy Nothing Day is not just an absolute resolution to buying nothing. Rather it is to raise awareness on a day when consumerism is supposed to be most rampant in an already excessively consuming Nation.

Although I completely support what the day stands for, I bought a newspaper and some coffee today. Even my dad bought a tv and I was excited for him because today was the first time he could afford the tv he has wanted the last five years.

Am I against my dad’s purchase and looking at him with disdain? No.

We do need to buy things, maybe not a tv, maybe not coffee. It is not as if you could completely reject capitalism and start bartering as some naïve critics say.

Remember it is excess Buy Nothing Day is targeting. Look at the commercial.

shaking things up

"Depression, for example, now affects more than 19 million people in the US. Pharmaceutical companies have made billions off its treatment, but what percentage of depression in the past few decades has been due to the travails of modern life, and how much the creation of drug manufacturers? That is to say, the more pathologized normal human responses to things like stress, poverty or urban alienation become, the more opportunity there is to “treat” these conditions with newer and shinier drugs. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: what came first, the illness or the cure? And as is the case with drugs like Vioxx and des, how do we know the cure won’t make us even sicker down the road?"

here



In my GB300 class we are doing an 'intercultural presentation' to help us learn how to market products and services to different countries and cultures.

I am marketing "community" to America. I have not decided from which city or country this product will come from. I have just begun research.

I am trying do it without being 'that kid', although it may already be too late.

so it goes