What Happens When You Get Fed Up

 [image:  none today, to allow you to form images in your mind as you read the poem.]

I wrote this poem in 2000 when the consumer culture was going strong.  At that time, Adbusters fostered the idea of international Buy-Nothing Day as a protest on the day after Thanksgiving.  That year, the theme was "Enough."  As in, you already have what you need.  I was a fairly recent convert to Buddhism at the time, and this theme of cultivating contentment in simplicity seemed to be basic dharma.  These days I think of it as cultivating equanimity rather than desire.  Those with something to sell have done their best this year to get everyone into the stores crazed with a frenzy for bargains.  I am pleased to see Adbusters is still at it, promulgating Buy-Nothing Xmas now. (link) 

        Enough
              (A Utopia)
            By Jeanne Desy
           
One year, children, everyone got fed up . . .
and stopped buying.
Nobody went to the mall that year,
nobody went to WalMart or
ate fast food or frozen pizza,
flew on a plane, bought a CD.
The economy came to a halt.

Unemployment rose to 50 percent.
The people who liked to work found work
and the rest stayed home with the kids.
Everyone planted gardens,
and cooked their own food
and cleaned their own houses,
everyone did their own laundry,
washed their own cars in the summer twilight. 
People wore slippers around the house.

The market declined for designer shoes,
theme parks and day care, acrylic nails
and Prozac, cellphones and pagers. 
Ringing and beeping tapered off, and
the air was spacious and quiet.
Nobody played the lottery, couldn’t afford to,
and no one bought guns. 
There was not much to steal anymore,
and not much to fight over now.
Everyone had enough to eat
and a roof over their heads.
That seemed to be what mattered.

The tax base eroded—there was
no money for missiles now, no money for war.
Young men stayed home and tended gardens.
Old men designed wonderful toys,
grandmas made biscuits and everyone learned to sew.
Happiness blossomed, addictions declined,
no money for drugs now,  anyway nothing to escape.
People grew their own catnip and drank tea
made with mint from their gardens,
and ate nastursiums and heirloom tomatoes.

Without ads, the TV went quiet.
There were no celebrities now,
everyone made their own music
with home-made drums and ancient guitars,
and told the old stories and wrote poems
with pencil on paper and read them out loud
over the breakfast table.   Factories closed.

The planet cooled, the air cleared.
You could see the stars. 
Wildflowers grew where there had been lawns,
rabbits came back to the yard, and foxes and owls.
The old folks sat on porches with dogs at their feet,
and shelled peas.  Barefoot women
hung sheets to dry in the sun.
Everyone just took care of themselves
and each other, and
no one was rich anymore, so no one felt poor.
Now that there wasn’t so much,
there was more than enough.
                   
© Jeanne Desy 2000

The Hard Way

The attacks going on right now on Mumbai's luxury hotels are unpleasantly resonant of the attack on the World Trade Towers - in both cases, symbols of wealth. You might say, of wretched excess.

I've been thinking about tomorrow, which is being called Black Friday. The meaning is that it is the day when consumer purchases put retailers "in the black." I'm afraid it's going to have another meaning when this is over, though retailers have pulled out all the stops, delivering pounds of advertising with my morning paper.

In the face of the drastic slowdown in consumer spending, with all sorts of retailers going bankrupt, it almost seems weird that there are still people advocating observing Black Friday as Buy Nothing Day, but there are. Here is a quote from the Adbusters' press release:

“If you dig a little past the surface you’ll see that this financial meltdown is not about liquidity, toxic derivatives or unregulated markets, it’s really about culture,” says the co-founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, Kalle Lasn. “It’s our culture of excess and meaningless consumption — the glorified spending and borrowing of the past decade that’s at the root of the crisis we now find ourselves in.”

That's the way we talked during the past years of frenzied consumption. I recall the first year I observed Buy Nothing Day, maybe ten years ago. I was nervous about making sure I had the food I needed for dinner. If I run out of something, I'll have to borrow it from a neighbor. Had to make sure the car had gas. Honestly, pledging to not buy anything for one day seemed novel and difficult.

There were never very many of us who thought that way. Our neighbors saw us as taking all the fun out of life. I understand. I remember when I thought shopping was fun, back in the seventies, when I had my first professional job, and a lot of illusions. I went to a shiny new mall the day after Thanksgiving and ran the stores like a commando. I remember buying a $50 blouse on impulse; I can't remember if that was the original price or the sale price. Either way, it was a lot of money for a blouse. (I did love that garment, too.)

We humans seem mostly to learn the hard way, by disaster. You could logic it out, you could see from your own experience that things never made you happy. You could see that having more than your neighbors just made them jealous. Over and over these humble truths are evident, but we don't want to pay attention. No wonder, with that flood of advertising promising the giddy thrill of the new.

When terrorists struck the Twin Towers, there were plenty of people who stood outside the mainstream of nationalistic fervor and desire for retaliation, who thought we could learn something instead. Maybe it showed that the rest of the world was getting tired of living with hunger and poverty, and watching American excess. If we had seen that, we might have have come up with a radically different alternative to declaring an unwinnable war, like making sure every child in Africa has a mosquito net to sleep under. That would have cost a lot less than the price we're paying now.

Enough

These are sobering times. The party’s over. But it was a party we found exhausting. All along this wild ride of greed and consumption, some of us kept turning toward simplicity and responsible living, tried to create space in our lives.

I wrote this poem in 2000, thinking about Buy Nothing Day. The theme that year was “Enough!”

In America, the Friday after Thanksgiving had become traditionally a day of hectic consumption, huge sales, the malls jammed, people trying to “get their Christmas shopping done.” (An odd way to see giving, isn’t it?)

Those of us who observed Buy Nothing Day simply pledged not to spend any money that day. Sounds simple, but it wasn’t. You’d be baking and run out of sugar and have to borrow a cup from a neighbor, like in the old days, when folks just didn’t “run to the store.” You’d get bored, but couldn’t go to a movie. You had to make sure you had gas in the car.

This poem sprang off that experience to imagine a simpler and more satisfying life that would be in many ways a throwback to the world of my childhood at its best. In the poem, I assumed people would choose this life. Instead, the busy consumer economy/lifestyle has toppled all around us. Yet, perhaps we will find new satisfactions in a more down-to-earth way of living.


Enough
by Jeanne Desy

One year, children, everyone got fed up . . .
and stopped buying.
Nobody went to the mall that year,
nobody went to WalMart or
ate fast food or frozen pizza,
flew on a plane, bought a CD.
The economy came to a halt.

Unemployment rose to 50 percent.
The people who liked to work found work
and the rest stayed home with the kids.
Everyone planted gardens,
and cooked their own food
and cleaned their own houses,
everyone did their own laundry,
washed their own cars in the summer twilight.
People wore slippers around the house.

The market declined for designer shoes,
theme parks and day care, acrylic nails
and Prozac, cellphones and pagers.
Ringing and beeping tapered off, and
the air was spacious and quiet.
Nobody played the lottery, couldn’t afford to,
and no one bought guns.
There was not much to steal anymore,
and not much to fight over now.
Everyone had enough to eat
and a roof over their heads.
That seemed to be what mattered.

The tax base eroded—there was
no money for missiles now, no money for war.
Young men stayed home and tended gardens.
Old men designed wonderful toys,
grandmas made biscuits and everyone learned to sew.
Happiness blossomed, addictions declined,
no money for drugs now, anyway nothing to escape.
People grew their own catnip and drank tea
made with mint from their gardens,
and ate nastursiums and heirloom tomatoes.

Without ads, the TV went quiet.
There were no celebrities now,
everyone made their own music
with home-made drums and ancient guitars,
and told the old stories and wrote poems
with pencil on paper and read them out loud
over the breakfast table. Factories closed.

The planet cooled, the air cleared.
You could see the stars.
Wildflowers grew where there had been lawns,
rabbits came back to the yard, and foxes and owls.
The old folks sat on porches with dogs at their feet,
and shelled peas. Barefoot women
hung sheets to dry in the sun.
Everyone just took care of themselves
and each other, and
no one was rich anymore, so no one felt poor.
Now that there wasn’t so much,
there was more than enough.

© Jeanne Desy 2000