Buy Nothing Day is upon us — today in the US and Canada, tomorrow here in The Rest of the World. Coincidentally, I’ve just started reading What Would Jesus Buy? Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse by Reverend Billy.
I’ve been reading about Reverend Billy for a while. He’s a (non-religious) performance artist who stages anti-consumerist “revival” demonstrations in American chain stores, and I expected this book to be a clever, consciousness-raising joke about consumerism. What I wasn’t expecting was prose so good it’s poetry. There, right in the first chapter, was a ‘sermon’ that echoed exactly the theme of my book — “eros versus telos”. Only the Reverend phrased it as “Love is the force that knows that life will survive if life is loved.”
You see, Life on this Earth isn’t separate from any social justice struggle. It’s too late in the game to separate these things. Issues will not be isolated from each other when the Earth is extinguished. When you look into the eyes of the person standing next to you and realize that this is the last breath you yourself will be taking because the world has, in fact, JUST ENDED, then all these issues are one. In that last gasp all the progressive Issues are simply Love, and all the advertisements are simply Love mocked to death.
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