Damn the Dimes

Four people have sent me the e-mail – it's making the rounds – imploring us to protest Bush's inauguration and the war in Iraq by spending "not one damn dime" on Thursday, Jan. 20. The idea is that if the capitalist machine grinds to a halt, Bush and company will finally wake up and smell the patchouli, ushering in a thousand years of peace and love. If I had one damn dime for every cockamamie scheme my fellow liberals cooked up, I'd spend them all this Thursday, in one impudent shopping spree.

The ten cent posse suggests you print a flyer, available on its web site, and give it to businesses you do not patronize that day, so that, for example, Aquarius Records – a locally-owned San Francisco record store – will know that you did not buy any CDs that day to show support for the troops in Iraq. I have a couple of problems with this whole plan, beginning with the act of making local merchants pay for a federal policy they may not even support. If the protest amounted to an inconvenience, say, creating noise by shouting or blowing horns in front of a store that happened to be right next to the White House, I would be more sympathetic to the protestors, but their acts will cause calculable harm to their neighbors, the people, frankly, who serve them and add in a quantifiable way to the quality of their lives.

NODD organizer Jesse Gordon responds to the question, 'won't you hurt small businesses?' Yup, we will, if we're effective. I think small businesses will be "temporarily adversely affected" more than "hurt" but this criticism is valid. And I acknowledge that most small businesses don't deserve to be hurt. But if they support our movement, they can close their doors on inauguration day as their form of protest. Mahatma Gandhi's preferred method of protest was nationwide strikes. Those protests hurt all businesses, both those who supported the British imperialists and those who opposed them. Gandhi eventually succeeded with those protests in driving out the British imperialists. The businesses who were hurt by his nationwide strikes ultimately benefited from the "march of freedom" which Gandhi promoted. We need a similar march of freedom in America now, to fight Bush's imperialism. We're asking, as did Gandhi, for support from those innocent businesses who may be hurt by our protest. We make shopping choices all the time and this is an opportunity to get out of our auto-pilot buying habits. Through this reflective boycott practice we can become better consumers, aware of how much choice we have, and how our buying and spending impact the world. Even if we choose to spend money on this day, we are doing it from a greater awareness of our power as consumers and of the role that businesses play in our country's policies. We will be far better informed consumers whether we choose to spend or not. This protest makes people more aware of their power as consumers, and it makes people more aware of their consumption choices. In the long run, making people more aware of those things benefits small businesses. When people make conscious choices about consumerism, they choose to support small local businesses. This statement was taken from the FAQ page on the NODDD website.

I live in one of San Francisco's most progressive districts. I'd bet we have more MoveOn.org members per capita than car owners. My neighborhood is called The Fillmore, home to the Fillmore Auditorium and once a center of the West Coast jazz scene. Today it is a community ever struggling to recover the ground it lost when the city pushed black-owned businesses and African-American and Asian-American (mostly Japanese) homeowners out so white people could move in.

Kevin, one of the sons of Bea's and Sons, always gives me a neighborly hello, even if I'm just walking by the grocery that's been in this neighborhood longer perhaps than I've been alive. You think I'm going to walk up to the counter on Thursday and, as those damn dime people suggest, hand him a list of all I'm not going to buy that day, expect him to commend me for fighting the power that's turning the world in a way I don't like? He'd have every reason to tell me to shove my change, that same and every other day after.