Forego the crowds: Celebrate 'Buy Nothing Day'/Week/Life

No one has to die under the feet of door-busting, Black Friday shoppers this morning. The 34-year-old employee who was trampled at a Long Island, N.Y., store last year would have been spared had more people celebrated Black Friday as Buy Nothing Day.

On Buy Nothing Day, some of us celebrate our own refusal to be stampeded by the kind of fear-driven consumerism that kills relatively few people outright, but is deadly to lasting human happiness and a livable planet. As the video below explains:

Rather than shop, you can just kick back and listen to Buy Nothing Day: The Album, organize a repudiation of the prosperity gospel or just enjoy not going to the mall.

Buy Nothing Day

Although Black Friday was never an exercise in spiritual enlightenment, the underfoot death of a Long Island Wal Mart employee should have been enough to give even rank materialists pause. And if that wasn't enough, perhaps the Toys_R_Us gun battle opened some closed eyes.

Perhaps wide enough to consider celebrating Buy Nothing Day, as the charming video below recommends:

Widespread observance of Buy Nothing Day would have produced no such tragedies, although it would have required merchants to adjust their annual business plans. There might be little hope for businesses that did not make a year in the black more of a year-round reality. Nor is there any place for an excessive prosperity gospel in the approach recommended by proponents of Buy Nothing day, as Frink explains->.