We must break free from Black Friday!!

So every year millions of Americans celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. Although the roots of Thanksgiving can be traced to religious and cultural traditions, in the United States it has taken the form of a secular celebration of family, friends, abundance of food, health and good fortune. Most people travel across the country to get together with family and friends and get a chance to create rich memories together. They enjoy a nice long weekend together and cherish the opportunity to leave their daily rut behind and just relax together with loved ones. It is a chance to stop and smell the roses and be grateful for all that is good in life.

But slowly yet surely corporate America has hijacked this beautiful and graceful holiday and converted it into a weekend of shopping frenzy and madness. The media bombards the public with promises of unearthly deals never to be seen again,  unbelievable prizes to early shoppers, the more you spend the more you save and so on.... The pressure of shopping on Black Friday is so intense that even children have started to believe that shopping on Friday is part and parcel of the Thanksgiving Holiday. Thus like zombies with no thought process of their own, majority of Americans rush through their Thanksgiving feast and head out to line up outside stores of choice. They forget that eating together as a big family and enjoying the food and real family time was the initial purpose of Thanksgiving! That purpose has been lost, now the purpose as dictated by corporate America's supercharged marketing and advertising is shopping for things you don't really need and spending money you don't really have!

It is a sad state of affairs, considering the fact that millions of Americans are still reeling from the recent economic depression, many have no jobs yet, many are in debt up to their necks yet they will go to the mall and spend and spend and spend, all the while thinking they are saving!! But saving what? If you spend $30 and save $10 on it, you still paid the $20 which you didn't really need to. It is scary to see how bad most Americans are at seeing the real truth. We do not have to buy something just so we can say we have it, we should buy what we really are in need of to sustain a healthy and safe life, everything else is luxury.

But I guess children born in the once land of plenty wouldn't know that , would they? Unfortunately no one has told them and nor have they realized it for themselves that the US is no longer the land of plenty in the real sense. It is time to educate the American public to make money wise decision and not allow big corporations  and designer labels tell them what they need to buy or own, instead it is time for them to make their own decision and take control of their financial mess.

P.S: I wrote this post after reading news about the violence seen this Black Friday and also reading an article on BBC World "The Dark Side of Black Friday". Here are links to both;

Black Friday shopping in US marred by violence
The dark side of Black Friday