G. Frink's

Did you know?

No one had to die under the feet of door-busting shoppers this morning. The 34-year-old employee who was trampled at a Long Island, N.Y., store would have been spared had more people celebrated Black Friday as Buy Nothing Day.

On Buy Nothing Day, some of us celebrate our own refusal to be stampeded by the kind of fear-driven consumerism that kills relatively few people outright, but is deadly to lasting human happiness and a livable planet.

Rather than shop, you can just kick back and listen to Buy Nothing Day: The Album, organize an anti-shopping protest that will get you booted out of your local megastore or just enjoy not going to the mall.

Nor is this merely a one-day celebration. Next week you can celebrate buy-necessities week while carefully considering how to live a more ecologically responsible, less debt-driven life in the face of an economic meltdown which we cannot simply consume our way out of. The primary sponsors of Buy Nothing Day have a somewhat unconventional view of the economic crisis. It's odd idea for our times, but they propose that we live within out means:

"If you dig a little past the surface you'll see that this financial meltdown is not about liquidity, toxic derivatives or unregulated markets, it's really about culture," says the co-founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, Kalle Lasn. "It's our culture of excess and meaningless consumption -- the glorified spending and borrowing of the past decade that's at the root of the crisis we now find ourselves in."

Economic meltdown, together with the ecological crisis of climate change could be the beginning of a major global cultural shift -- the dawn of a new age: the age of Post-Materialism.

"A simpler, pared-down lifestyle -- one in which we're not drowning in debt -- may well be the answer to this crisis we're in," says Lasn. "Living within our means will also make us happier and healthier than we've been in years."

You can begin walking that path any day of any week.

Skeptics and enthusiasts alike will agree that if you'll buy that, you'll buy less.