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 Melbourne Culture Jammers Invite you to Cut Up Your Credit Card for Buy Nothing Day (BND)
Friday November 24 is Buy Nothing Day The Melbourne Culture Jammers will be in the Bourke Street Mall from 11am to 2pm, cutting up credit cards, to see how much consumer credit we can take out of circulation. Back in 2004, we cut up $38,000 worth! Celebrate this simple moment of abstaining. 24 hours out of the shopping loop. We have turned from a nation of savers into a nation of debtors, owing billions of dollars on "household credit". Credit has even become fashionable, with wearable credit cards and flashy new designs. Most of which we waste on replacing things which have not worn out. How symbolic of our consuming to excess. What is Buy Nothing Day? Buy Nothing Day is a marvellously self explanatory event – a day we encourage people to go a whole 24 hours without buying anything. Can you go a whole day without succumbing to the temptation to own just one more thing? Shopping and spending has become such an integral part of our lives, our conversations and our culture, it's a challenge to leave the wallet in one's pocket and not buy anything. Buy Nothing Day is the day after Thanksgiving in North America, and the traditional start of the Christmas shopping binge. BND was started in 1992 in Canada by the guys at Adbusters ( www.adbusters.org). Background Every year, Australians spend billions and billions of dollars in the months before and after Christmas. Whatever religious significance the event may have had has been subsumed into a massive shopping festival. How much of this is sheer waste? How many trinkets will be given as gifts, then discarded the next day? But it's not just this season. Every year, we Australians waste vast amounts of money and resources buying a whole lot of stuff we don't really need. If the whole world consumed the way we do, we'd need another two and a half Earths to sustain us. Consider this. There are more mobile phones in this country than there are adults. They're upgraded on average every 18 months. At the same time, 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a phone call. And consider this - every year an average Australian wastes $1500 on things they didn't need or bought by accident. While currently, the average Indonesian earns just $960 a year. Seems a bit unfair, doesn't it? We simply can't go on like this. Join us on Buy Nothing Day, and see what it's like to not be a simple consumer for 24 hours. Contacts For the Melbourne Jammers: Paul Johanson Email: jammer@culturejammers.org.au URLs: www.culturejammers.org.au and www.adbusters.org The Jammer phone: 0404-282-449 Respectfully Reproduced,
Burton N. Danet, Ph.D. (BND)
Co-Founder, ABC4All
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