America’s High Holiday
Posted on November 28, 2010 | posted by:
Apparently, it’s called “Black Friday” because retailers hope strong sales on this day – the busiest shopping day of the year – will help put them “in the black” (i.e. profitable, as opposed to “in the red” or in debt). But I still think it’s a creepy name for the first day of the holiday season.
Historically, the label Black Friday has had some pretty dark connotations. Basically, any time something really bad happens on a Friday, people remember it as Black Friday. These unfortunate occasions have included tragedies ranging from a Scottish maritime disaster, to a massacre of Iranian protestors, to the assassination of President Kennedy.
And black days aren’t limited to the end of the week. Black Tuesday was the day the stock market crashed in 1929, ushering in the Great Depression. If the modern shopping holiday, Black Friday, is all about helping our economy by helping ourselves (to more stuff), why does it share essentially the same name as the worst moment in our economic history?
What can be read in the ominous overtones written in the name of this high holiday of shopping? Perhaps we’re not entirely comfortable with this celebration of consumer culture. Perhaps we feel guilty that it has become so central to our economic and spiritual lives. Perhaps it’s becoming harder to justify the obvious social and environmental costs of our consumption with its supposed economic benefits.
What Donella Meadows and other systems thinkers call the “limits-to-growth archetype,” is staring us in the face every time we swipe our credit cards. The short-term effects of our spending may be encouraging growth and putting our economy back “in the black,” but in the long term, we know that it cannot last.
We are just blowing up the bubble again for another burst. Whether it’s the markets (stock, IT, housing, job, or otherwise) or the environment, any constrained context in which we insist on relentless growth will inevitably make its limitations known to us – and it will be another dark day when it does.
As happy as I am for our struggling economy that consumer confidence is up this year, and as much as I would like to wish everyone the blackest Friday ever, it’s increasingly difficult to overlook the larger implications of all this holiday cheer. After the presents are unwrapped and the decorations taken down, what am I left with but more stuff, less money, and the sinking feeling that Santa Claus is a lie?
But what if we stopped repeating these empty rituals, and started celebrating something more meaningful? I’m not sure Black Friday must be replaced with Buy Nothing Day, but what if we could spread holiday spirit by some other means than buying? What if the measure of our merriment – indeed the success of our society – were based on qualitative rather than quantitative growth? What would this look like?