Stuffing the Stockings with Less Stuff

It is easy to get caught up in holiday consumerism. It's not unusual for people to find themselves spending money on decorations, or rushing through thrift-stores searching for something, anything!, to get for friends and family. We like holidays because they offer us ritual, connection with people, and something to celebrate. But, even when the ritual involves buying unnecessary, excessive presents, we can find ourselves participating in that ritual—and it may not necessarily be a ritual we would have consciously chosen.


So how does one celebrate the holidays without breaking the bank, or giving in to the rituals of consumerism? Simple. Develop new rituals. This year, you don’t have to rack up credit card debt or get swept up in the season’s commercialism. Instead, consider creating holidays that instill more meaning into the season and encourage more sharing, laughter, creativity, and personal renewal.

According to the National Retail Federation, shoppers spent a total of $441.97 billion during the 2008 holiday season. 40% of Americans start their holiday shopping before Halloween. According to the Nilson Report, Americans’ credit card debt, by the end of 2008, reached $972.73 billion, up 1.12% from 2007, with the average credit card debt per household totaling $8,329. These numbers point to the urgency of our revisioning consumer habits. What if—instead of buying “stuff” for holiday gifts—we gave gifts of time, gifts of experience and gifts of charity?

Gifts of time include things like babysitting, car washing, a month of taking out the garbage, doing the dishes, shoveling the snow, cleaning the cat box, dog walking or pet sitting, or a hiking trip. When I was a young mother, my best friend always gave me one day of child-care a week. Oh, how I looked forward to that day each week when I could have “my own” time!—a respite from the demands of parenting two active toddlers.

Gifts of experience include things like an offer to teach a skill such as canning, ballroom dancing, knitting, or swimming. I often give my horsy friends a gift certificate for a dressage lesson. Or, I gift them with an afternoon of hiking and wildcrafting in the backcountry.

Gifts of charity might include a donation to a cause in the name of a family member. Some families make gifts to charities and then present family members with a coupon or card indicating the gift was made in their name. Or, you could support a homeless shelter or protect an acre of rainforest. You could designate an amount of money to donate to charity and let your children pick which causes will receive it. Older children can research organizations that match your family’s values.

And, of course, there is the option of homemade gifts. Homemade salsa, jam and baked goods all taste much better than their commercial counter-parts. Include, of course, the recipe. Or, you can mix tins of dried, wildcrafted teas such as lavender, mint or rose hips. Include a mesh tea strainer. One of my favorites is a mix of lavender, rose petals and clover.

Being creative and keeping your mind focused on the real meaning of gift-giving will help you keep the culture's "buy more" influence at bay. Keep in mind, too, that the efforts you make to curb your holiday spending now will free up more cash for the coming year. And that's the best holiday gift you can give yourself and your family.

Unplugging from The Man, Part 2

One of the things that we need to do in order to Unplug is change our thinking. This is huge: much bigger than most people realize. Most people, in fact, have no real idea what they are thinking. They are on remote control, auto-pilot, creatures of habituated behavior that hasn't been examined in decades. Like Pavlov's dogs, they are fully conditioned robots.

Unplugging begins in the head. We have to mentally Unplug before we can physically Unplug. I'm talking about making conscious decisions to change deeply entrenched patterns of behavior. Let's look at a couple of examples:

Every time that people run out of an item, they automatically assume that "they need another one" and put it on the shopping list. The same is true of things that get broken, lost or worn-out. The meme is that everything has to be replaced: always, forever. This is simply not true. We already have enough "stuff" in our garages, attics, cellars and storage sheds to patch-in for anything that really needs to be replaced. The first question, though, is: "do we really even need this item?" Chances are, we don't. Chances are, we already own a dozen other items that can do the same task. Next step: use one of those.

If, however, the answer is that we really do need the item, the next question becomes, "do we have anything with which to 'make do' in place of this item?" My Grandmother, a feisty Vermonter, was the Master of Making-Do. I thought of her the other day when I needed a small embroidery hoop. Mine had gone missing and was nowhere to be found--and I certainly wasn't about to buy another one. How could I 'make do'? What would my Grandmother have done? After a bit of thrashing around, I seized upon the idea of using the ring from a lid of a wide-mouth canning jar and a rubber band. 'Worked just fine!

But to pull this off, we have to stop the automatic impulse to "go get it" and, instead, cultivate an impulse to "create it". We have to replace buying with making. After a person switches to this type of thinking, it is not only liberating--it is downright fun! We are the artists of our own lives--lives that truly belong to us, not to The Man. Freedom! The most raw and potent form of secession.

While we are talking about changing our minds, we should look at how we view people. Do we discontinue using our snow-plow guy (even though he's given us 20 years of good, loyal service?) because some new guy will do it "cheaper"? Or, do we let our experienced teachers get laid off and be replaced by inexperienced rookies, because they are "cheaper"? And, do we evict our tenant with whom we have an informal rent-control agreement in order to get a new tenant who can "pay more"? These kinds of things happen every day of the week. People are not widgets! Let me say that again: people are not widgets! There is more to our "business" relationships than business. There is humanness. We are human beings first; landlords, tax payers and property owners second.

Do you remember where your Grandfather worked? Everybody in the shop knew each other--and each other's children. They cared about each other's families. They were community. If someone fell into hard times, they passed the hat. If a neighbor couldn't pay the rent, solutions were found by which s/he could remain in their home and work it out. They guy who plowed the snow was part of the family--he got a big box of cookies for the Holidays and a rag-doll for his child. Sure, people watched their pennies. But, that wasn't all that they watched. They knew that they needed each other and that their community was only as strong as their weakest member.

This is going to require a big shift in the head. Contemporary Americans feel justified in getting "the cheapest"--no matter what the actual cost of the so-called "bargain" is. We have to start looking at the big picture again. Enlightened self-interest needs to replace simply self-interest.

The Man isn't going to help us change our minds. He's doing just fine by keeping us Plugged In. We're going to have to do this on our own. It's going to require some mindfulness training. Noble Simplicity!

Author’s Note: This blogpost was the second in a series of articles about Unplugging from the Man. Stay tuned for more suggestions and ideas about achieving personal freedom.

Unplugging from The Man, Part 1

In the words of T.S. Elliot, “so how should I presume” to draw a line in the sand? There are, actually, as many ways as there are grains of sand, but the way that seems most accessible to me is Unplugging from The Man. Scott Nearing put it succinctly when he wrote that he “must reduce wants and even needs to a minimum; wherever possible, serve myself, raise and prepare my own food, wash my own clothing, do my own building and repairing, maintain the best of health to avoid the heavy costs involved in sickness, keep down such fixed costs as rent, interest and taxes; never borrow and take on interest slavery, but always pay cash; build up a capital reserve sufficient to cover a full year of unemployment, and be prepared for emergencies.” (The Making of a Radical, p. 44) Nearing was a strong advocate of Unplugging from The Man, which he referred to as The Establishment.

People can unplug, or not, according to their individual comfort levels. There are dozens of ways to pull the plug. We can all do it differently and still make a collective impact. And, we can do it incrementally and progressively as we get more comfortable with new lifestyle behaviors. There's no point in expecting The Man to change. It's not going to happen. The corrupt system works for him. He's getting richer and fatter. So, we have to find a way to wave goodbye to The Man who has never paid more than lip service to any one of our attempts to "pursue life, liberty and happiness." This is secession in its rawest, most potent form.

This blogpost is the first in a series (hence, the Pt. 1 notation) about Unplugging from the Man. Throughout the series, I am going to write both theoretically and practically--very, very practically--about how to systematically Unplug from The Man. I began unplugging in 1974 and am still discovering deeper, more wide-spectrum ways to pull the plug. The more I unplug, the more I find myself, in the words of Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life. I don’t feel as if I have given anything up. I feel, conversely, as if I am liberated from things that I really never needed in the first place.

Let's start with some of the theoretical considerations. Heidegger’s big idea was that most people get so lost in das Man (The Man) that they never engage in real discourse, being content, instead, with idle chatter—groundless, buzzing pop-talk that focuses on reaching a superficial consensus instead of exploring anything new. They never really examine their lives and, consequently, they don't know themselves. Totally exteriorized, they are easy to enculturate, to condition and to propagandize. It's easy for The Man to keep them subdued in the golden handcuffs of convenience, comfort and consumer goods.

But, one day the handcuffs start to feel tight. They might even chafe their wrists. Their bubble-priced home is suddenly under-water, the warranty wears off their new SUV, their paycheck can't keep pace with rising food and fuel prices, they get furloughed and their kids can't afford college. Most wonder if this is The American Dream? A few realize that they've been lied to while The Man has laughed all the way to the bank.

Jean Gebser’s seminal work, Ever-Present Origin, posits a map of psycho-history in theorizing that we are currently in a period that Gebser calls the Mental-Rational Period. It is a period that represents the culmination of the development of the human ego. Gebser further theorizes that, used in its negative sense (ie, acquisition, superficiality and separateness), the ego will lead to complete collapse of civilization. The only way that humanity, in his view, can move forward from Empire to Earth Community (to borrow David Korten’s words) is through reaching back into earlier structures of consciousness-- which Gebser calls the Magical and Mythic--and reintegrating their practices and lifestyle patterns. I agree. Because those very practices and lifestyle patterns offer us a tried and true blueprint for Unplugging from The Man! Let's get started!

The people of the Magical period were nomadic. They ‘got their groceries off the ground’ through gathering. We can reintegrate this practice through WILDCRAFTING. One of the most disturbing and extraordinary aspects of life in the US is the persistence of hunger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that food insecurity was accelerating even prior to the recession: the number of people reported in 2008 was more than double the number in 2000.

As the recession has deepened, there are too many families surviving predominantly on refined carbohydrates such as bread, pasta, and macaroni because these products are less expensive, as a result of being subsidized by the government. In 2005, the government spent $17 billion subsidizing grain farmers. Rather than focusing on the production of fruits and vegetables, more than half of US subsidies go to grain farmers.

And yet we know that fruits and vegetables—especially leafy greens—are nutritional powerhouses. Dark green leafy vegetables are, calorie for calorie, perhaps the most concentrated source of nutrition of any food. It was common for our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors to eat up to six pounds of leaves per day. Imagine them walking along from one place to another, just picking and eating greens as they went—a veritable bonanza of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients.

Contemporary wildcrafting offers us the same opportunity. Wildcrafting is the practice of harvesting edible plants from their natural, or "wild" habitats. It means, literally, discovering that the woods and fields are a table always spread. It’s seeing the world as a garden. I will be wildcrafting by mid-April and, as the days grow longer and warmer, I will be able to harvest up to 15 types of wild green edibles each afternoon in my own backyard. While waiting for the cultivated greens in my garden to mature, I will already have been making huge, dark green salads from my wildcrafted veggies.

America’s hunger problem could be reduced if people were taught the ancient art of wildcrafting. Families could find food—and lots of it--right in their backyards! Further, if municipalities were encouraged to stop using chemically toxic sprays on parks and roadsides, wild foods could also be harvested there. And, we could pull the plug on The Man. We wouldn’t need to buy commercially produced (often by huge multi-national corporations) leafy greens that have been transported thousands of miles.

It is anomalous. We are in the midst of one of the worst recessions in American history. Literally millions of people don’t have access to secure food supplies. State and local governments are reeling in debt. Yet, instead of encouraging wildcrafting, we continue to spend millions of tax dollars spraying toxic chemicals on precious wild edibles.

Dandelion, for example, has diuretic properties, which means that it can help the body eliminate extra water. Along with these properties, dandelion is very good at supporting the liver by increasing bile production. I juice the leaves, use them in salads and make a lip-smacking-good dandelion jelly out of the blossoms.

Humans have been eating chickweed and using it medicinally throughout history. Chickweed is very nutritious and can be eaten raw or cooked. The younger leaves are great in salads and older parts of the plant can be cooked like spinach (without the risk of e coli infections from CAFO run-offs).

During Fall foliage season, wild fruits abound, as do berries and nuts. There is really nothing finer than cracking wild walnuts by a cozy Autumn woodfire, while feasting on a wild apple pie—unless, of course, it’s a bowl of wild plums! Unplugging from The Man does not result in austerity. It results in simple prosperity. It is personal freedom. To become unplugged is to become free. Each thing that we can do to cut ties with The Man and its established order creates more freedom. This really is secession in its rawest and most potent form.

Note: This blogpost is the first in a series about Unplugging from the Man. Stay tuned for subsequent posts which will offer more suggestions and practical ideas about achieving personal freedom through Unplugging.

Drawing a Line in the Sand

Where do we draw the line in the sand? Where do we say, "enough is enough"? At what point do we stop simply signing petitions and, instead, start fighting back against a culture that is killing us all? Egypt has set an example. Wisconsin has, too.

In his 2006 book, Endgame, Derrick Jensen reminds us that if we are "propping up industrialized civilization", we are ipso facto promoting violence. He further reminds us that "Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to eviscerate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses."

Jensen's not a lone wolf. There are plenty of people saying this. And, it's not even a particularly recent theme. Herbert Marcuse, for example, sang the same song in the late 1960's in An Essay on Liberation when he argued that traditional conceptions of human freedom have been rendered obsolete by the development of advanced industrial society. Marcuse closes the essay by saying that "the construction of a free society would create new incentives for work." He clarifies that "in exploitive societies, the so-called work instinct is mainly the introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a living." The One Dimensional Man.

The wheels are coming off of the wagon. Trying to keep putting them back on is like sticking our fingers in a hole in the dike: an unsustainable, "little picture" attempt to "solve" the problem. It's time to draw a line in the sand. It's time to realize that there really isn't any "fixing" the corporate whore that we call "the government". As Marcuse wrote, "The Great Refusal takes a variety of forms."