Have a shop-free Saturday
By Martha McClelland
This Saturday, 29 November, is ``Buy Nothing Day.'' A clever
attempt by your Ma to hang on to the housekeeping for one more
week before Christmas? No, although she might support the idea.
Buy Nothing Day has been organised internationally by a coalition
of green, environmental and development groups to highlight the
injustice and unsustainability of today's global consumer
culture.
Buy Nothing Day makes direct links between the exploitation of
Third World countries - forced to grow ``cash crops'' to service
IMF debts at their expense of feeding their people - and the
``shop till you drop'' consumer culture of Western capitaliam.
It comes to Ireland for the first time this year, having been
organised very successfully in other countries last year.
Organised in Ireland by the Foyle Green Party with the support of
Friends of the Earth, Northwest Community Network, the Campaign
for Decent Wages, Foyle Homeless and Foyle Basin Council, Buy
Nothing Day calls on people to buy nothing on this one day of the
year.
Organiser Andrew Grannell of the Foyle Greens said ``Buy Nothing
Day is becoming an international celebration of resistance to the
cult of consumption. With skyrocketing debt and humiliating wages
for the working class here, paralleling the crippling economic
policies forced onto sisters and brothers in Third World
countries by the global consumer economy. this is an opportunity
to stop, think and act. The commercial exploitation of Christmas
has become a truism, yet few of us do anything about it.
``150 years after the Great Hunger here, Third World countries are
still experiencing similar fates. In recent years, during a
famine in Ethiopia, Ethiopians were forced to use their only
arable land to grown cash crops instead of food, to service debt
to First World banks.
In Derry, the Day of Action will be marked by guerrilla theatre
and other imaginative (and humorous) consciousness-raising
actions in Derry. Families experiencing life on the bread-line,
environmentalists, supporters of people in the Third World - most
of the above should include republicans! - and anyone with a
sense of humour and conscience will be joining local musicians,
actors and poets on the streets of Derry this Saturday.
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