Reverend Billy prepares for Buy Nothing Day

Prepare for the Eighth Annual Buy Nothing Day Parade

Tomorrow, Reverend Billy and his followers will step off once again in the continuing crusade against mindless consumerism and economic self-immolation. This year, Reverend Billy has an epiphany of angels transforming the financial district of New York City. Start from Columbus Circle East, near the angel statue and then take a fairly direct route through the heart of bank land to UBS, defining evil in 2010. The marketing techniques of retail banking are like all corporate consumer campaigns, with smiling actors promising happiness, power, youth… The big banks also move hundreds of millions to super malls and chains, overwhelming neighborhood and community shops. Some of the banks, UBS especially – finance such earth-abusive activities as “Mountaintop Removal.” On Friday November 26, 2010 – BUY NOTHING!

Meditating on our parade on Friday. I have a vision of liquid shimmering the hard surfaces of the banks. We won’t buy anything on Friday because we fly through the molecules in the walls of institutions of high finance. Our white wings will lift the customers above the cash machines, up into so much money it will become meaningless.

The ancient Sumerians believed that there was a sacred swampy material, and the gods were formed by it and emerged from it, walking forward out of the holy muck. The gods emerged from this fertile soup in pairs and now they are among us.

We will be like those gods, because that sacred swamp is only everyday life. We emerge to touch the abstraction of billions of dollars so that all that money suddenly becomes actual, at which point we begin to laugh because it is no longer threatening us. We don’t have to wonder anymore how value is shifted somehow from a piece of paper sucked into a slot in the wall of an ATM – how this symbol of value, these figures on a screen tremble in the office buildings and then vibrate out across the land. Nobody knew how this happened until we rose like angels from the magic schmutz. Nobody could figure how our money blows up mountains, why our work converts into detonated distant bombs and how in hell does our everyday life pierce the flesh of shepherds and newlyweds and children on the roads.

I see angels of peace rising from the streets and entering the hard, square buildings to loosen the abstract money from the computer screens. I see angels flying through thick shiny steel walls like the absolute opposite of bombs. I know that my thoughts would be crimes if they were more than thoughts. What is the distance from this day-dream and Friday’s parade?

Don't expect this to get the same kind of TV coverage as the Macy's parade, because the revolution won't be televised, but you can find more of this on their very elaborate website.

David Roknich

DOGSPOT