booandbunny

If you agree (which I cant see why you wouldnt) resend this to all your contact list.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: buy the day before or the day after but not on the 15th!

I want to believe. I really do. I want to believe American consumers understand "what's in your wallet."

Power. That's right. POWER. Consider every dollar you spend (or charge) to be a vote for each of the many, many people who divvy it up at the end of the day ... the local station owner, the refiner, the trucker, the big oil company. So, when I saw this I wanted to believe people might go for it, though I knew in my heart one day wouldn't dent the big companies' profits. So I decided to Google it. I found this:

snopes.com

And yet I wasn't disheartened. Why? Because of this paragraph right here:

"Not buying gas on a designated day might make people feel better about things by providing them a chance to vent their anger at higher gasoline prices, but the action won't have any real impact on retail prices. An effective protest would involve something like organizing people to forswear the use of their cars on specified days, an act that could effectively demonstrate the reality of the threat that if gasoline prices stayed high, American consumers were prepared to move to carpooling and public transportation for the long term. Simply changing the day one buys gas, however, imparts no such threat, because nothing is being done without."

Doing without. If you're about my age then your grandparents were likely a part of Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation." Doing without meant lots of things to them, but none of it seemed to be whining, if I remember the speeches correctly. More people lived together in smaller homes closer to work and stores and banks and schools and churches and everywhere you need to go. I saw a thing the other night on one of my geek TV channels (Discovery/National Geographic/History ... love 'em all!) that in the 1800s the average speed of traffic in Midtown Manhattan was 9 m.p.h. Today it is 6 m.p.h.! I promise you those horses' behinds were spewing something, but not the equivalent to what we spew in traffic now!

Lately, my reading has been telling me this ... many of the stressers in our lives we have created for ourselves. Now we must try to undo them ... . (sorry Time doesn't still have the story online, but it was very inspiring.) I've been trying to live simpler for awhile now. We have a van and a motorcycle. Each uses about 1 tank a week, so not buying gas on May 15 is no sacrifice for us. We only go once a week anyway. But what about the rest of it? What about the culture of consumption? And why can't anyone say what we are all asking inside ... are you worried people will think you just can't afford it? And why do we care if people think we can't afford it? Hey! We can all start covering this fear with the trendy new greenness.

Less is more. People get stressed out by their debt and by all their stuff. I'm going to continue to try reducing ... even if it drives my husband mad. I'm sick of all this crap all over the place! Don't worry, Handsome, I'm not gonna' go Compact on you ... just yet. Paring down is where it's at. Green is the new red, white and blue (Thanks, Tom Friedman) ... we've just got to get people to stop thinking choices are black and white.

That's my rant for now. Thanks for reading. Next week I will have loads of time to post pictures of all that has been keeping me from the keys. I miss checking in on my bloggitty buddies, especially Sunday Scribblings. Hope you enjoy the links ... and your weekend. ;)