(Mr. Talen is Reverend Billy www.revbilly.com, spiritual leader of the New York-based group, "The Church of Stop Shopping.")
As the new economic czars walk to the lectern, they promise to "stabilize" and "calm" and "inject confidence" - as if the money markets have a psychological problem which is also the diagnosis of you and me.
The big bucks investors will shop again when they feel better, and the rest of us will follow soon after, standing in line to swipe the plastic. This is the old approach. Economists take care of the top, and advertising and the new Grand Theft Auto will bring the consumers at the bottom. This time, though, that approach is a grand delusion. Something else is happening. We are in the midst of a tectonic shift in how we live our lives. The ground and sky are moving. We are changing more in our everyday lives than at any time since the Civil Rights Movement or the great convulsions of the sixties. Call it the Revolution of Common Sense. There isn't so much a new ideology rising as a mass shrug of the shoulders and rolling up of the sleeves.
This revolution is quiet and it doesn't seem to have leaders. Oh, there are some brilliant cheerleaders on the sidelines, but the change is happening on its own with the inevitable feeling of a planet turning.
Common sense - you just know it - it can go unannounced. I was searching for a core belief for this movement and I came up with - life wants to sustain itself. Translated into everyday life, this might be more like: "I have to make a living." And especially - "How do I protect my loved ones, my family?" Soon it will dawn on economists that we don't want to merely recover from this recession. We don't want to replay the 90's, but rather grow out of all this. We want to move beyond it...
The public is far more radical, again in that common sense way, than the chatting TV experts trying to catch our eyes and ears. The public knows that these analysts won't ask if the old economy was sustainable in the first place. Consumers are becoming citizens again, a not-easily-measured transformation back to ideal values not guided by marketing. Advertising has very little credibility right now, and this new Christmas campaign looks like a last-ditch bombing run. Our images for happiness, prosperity, and even sexiness - may be shifting to the gesture we ourselves can make in the foreground of our communities, in our own cameras... We are converting hobbies into businesses, trading from garages and pick-up trucks, unearthing the leftovers of consumer life in closets and basements and backyards - then entering the burgeoning thrift and bartering economies. There are record numbers of new companies starting up each week. Community credit unions nationwide added 450,000 new members from March to June.
Leading the way is the rise of the new organic family farm and the green-markets, where people are meeting personally without corporate sponsorship of any kind. The number of green-markets in the United States has nearly doubled in the last decade. The Obama-inspired filling of the commons with peaceful crowds, and the door-to-door and sleep-on-my-couch culture of that campaign - has brought trust back to our communities. When the consumer economy was most "successful" - we were isolated from one another by the proliferation of products. Why talk to a human in the flesh when you're ear-budded and wired and SUV'd and billboarded - all that packaging! Now that we are released from the demands of product-life, many of us are meeting one another in our own neighborhoods, walking to the edge of the lawn, calling from the fire escape, reaching over the counter - "What can I do for you..." and "Can you help me fix this?...."
Most dramatic of all -- families are literally re-inventing the dominant cultural ritual of the year, the celebration of Christmas. This has been the centerpiece of the retail economy's year, with the corporations hoping to go into the black on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving. Many Americans are now changing that day's name to "Buy Nothing Day." We get email every day at the Church of Stop Shopping -- "Reverend you won't find us in the mall this year!" Giving in the present tense is rising, buying on time is fading. The commercial frenzy and its months of debt - is transformed into a moment in the year when we give our loved ones our time, we share life, we gather our gifts locally, create gifts with our own skills and imagination... It's just common sense!