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Hate Musk & Friends? Don’t grind your teeth, bite the bastards! No-Buy-Friday strikes back! [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-23
Hate Musk & Friends? Don’t grind your teeth, bite the bastards! No-Buy-Friday strikes back!
Please note: I am running this diary a day later than usual, because I was without Internet service yesterday. As it’s meant to serve as a weekly reminder, later still serves the purpose.
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Erratic behavior and ‘courting of crazy’, have catapulted Musk into collective consciousness even higher than “Starship” could, making him the ‘enfant terrible’ of our current canker of billionaires. Depending on which week it is, and who’s underbelly is being exposed, hubris bounces back-and-forth amongst them in the pinball machine of public opinion.
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Our memory tends to favor events within a more or less normal emotional range and we appear incapable of fully recalling those which caused extreme pain or pleasure. While we may remember the moment, our conscious mind receives the ‘CliffsNotes’ version of what we actually experienced, with the full impact of its effect on us edited out. Such emperic extremes cannot be ‘reexperienced’ by recollection. They can only be lived.
Their ‘blunting’ ensures that ‘fresh’ catastrophes which ‘breach the rim’ of un-retainable memory always appear worse than any we’ve suffered in the past and this lack of perspective can make absorbing the news brutally traumatizing.
The manner in which numerous DK readers have reacted to ‘100 days of mayhem’ suggests that many are still inhibited from action by trauma, confusion and the fear of retribution.
I grapple with this daily, depending on the severity of unraveling events and the way they impact me subconsciously. While recognizing symptoms of this in others may be partial projection on my part, the dearth of attention being paid to diaries providing pro-active options speaks louder and more directly to me.
Our limits are being constantly tested and as things worsen, those limits can collapse as we get pushed beyond reckoning. Trauma is given little rest for healing, leaving many struggling to reestablish emotional equilibrium.
This is not conducive to functional recovery, even for those actively seeking its benefits. As a result, pro-action remains problematic, and often, more or less out of reach.
Nevertheless, there is a safe method open to us for expressing our displeasure and using our latent power to check that of the oligarchy. No-Buy-Friday.
Dialogue, while providing a means for venting, is put to better use when it leads to comprehensive analysis.
While not always the case, this should be the primary purpose of the ‘Comments’ option DailyKos offers us. When the comments thread realizes its potential for a free and open exchange of ideas and information, it can expand the value of a diary exponentially, making the efforts of those engaged a very valuable form of pro-action.
…and yet, the times we live in demand more.
While our lives can be demanding and the need to tend to them is powerful, in our present circumstances, if we don’t rise to this greater ‘need’, our lives will be gutted.
Ask yourself these simple questions: Am I doing enough? … and considering what’s at stake:
How much is enough?
The shifting of personal responsibility onto ‘authority’, while so inherently human as to slip consciousness, is not the answer.
It’s easier to be mad at somebody for not doing what you should be doing, than to do what they do not.
Although ‘those who’s job this is’ may indeed be ‘contractually bound’ to taking pro-active responsibility, that does not absolve the rest of us from taking personal action of our own, as we face this threat to survival together and inseparably.
The simple realization that no one exists in total isolation, and that we effect the world, both as individuals, as well as by shifting in and out of collective mode, can help lead to self-empowerment.
We never worry that if we go to a concert no one else will show up. We go because we choose to go and desire is the driving force.
The same is true with less appetizing forms of pro-action. In this case, the hunger for pleasure needs to be replaced by the ‘obligation’ to live up to personal responsibilities and ultimately the ‘need’ to survive.
No-Buy-Friday offers us a remarkable opportunity to become pro-active with little risk, free from surveillance and retribution. Although spending can be tracked, pinning down the purpose behind it cannot — at least for the time being. Even if you repeatedly adhere to No-Buy-Friday, you’ll find safety in the masses who simply never shop on Friday for other reasons, and if you do shop, but avoid ‘Big-Box’, your motives will likewise remain obscure.
Perhaps of greater priority to most (in a society where security is frequently sacrificed to ‘ease’), is that rather than having to do something and thereby adding to your workload, here your ‘efforts’ become effective by doing less — shopping.
Of course, the real work takes place in your mind. Consumerism in its current form qualifies as an addiction, and this can make what should be a simple shift in priorities seem untenable.
Like attempting to diet, curbing the endorphin and dopamine ‘Catherines Wheel’ released by incessive compulsive gluttony, requires a force strong enough to counteract chemically (and psychologically) enhanced desire.
The threat to democracy and the environment create sufficient fear to supply that force, and it has already begun to knock down the subconscious barriers that block our recognition of self-destructive priorities — clearing the way for pro-action.
NBF lays the foundation for consumers to reclaim self-determination and that strikes fear into
the voided souls of our overlords. Nevertheless, self-determination is merely the means, while survival is the end game here.
It’s ironic that ‘one person - one vote’ is considered viable on this site, but individual action, in a myriad of other forms is often not.
“After all, what can just one person do?”
Greta Thunberg, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Helen Keller, Jimmy Carter and countless others occur quickly to me, though conveniently ‘forgotten’ by others for the sake of evasion.
“But I’m no Gandhi”, you say.
Neither was he to start with — action transformed him into ‘Gandhi’.
So channel your anger at Musk and the other fascist oligarchs by realizing your potential through similar action.
NBF, while it appears to speak softly, carries a financial ‘cudgel’ and trust me, these bastards feel it.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/19/2323003/-How-to-Stand-Up-to-a-Dictator?utm_campaign=recent#comment_91310526
Mokurai 5/19/25 profile of Maria Ressa
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/16/2322729/-Donor-Strike-against-Corrupt-Crypto-Democrats?utm_campaign=trending
Boycott of bad Dems 5/16/25 ‘bob fertik’`
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/15/2322290/-The-Cost-of-Imitative-AI-or-Environmental-Cope?utm_campaign=spotlight#comment_91295796
Angryea 5/16/25 Musk and Memphis/ why he’s a target for NBF
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/21/2323568/-Target-sales-plummet-after-bowing-to-Trump-s-anti-diversity-crusade
Target shoppers ban. Oliver Willis 5/21/25
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[1] Url:
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