As my family learned in our recent power outage, doing without is a great way to challenge the status quo in our lives. This past week’s wake-up call came on Thursday and Friday. Without really planning it out in advance, we decided we’d do a 2 day spending fast (aka boycott) in solidarity with the 2/16 #DiaSinInmigrantes/ Day Without Immigrants and then on 2/17 in solidarity with the General Strike. We didn’t go all the way with either of these events. Given the nature of our work, ‘walking off the job’ would probably do more harm than good to the cause. And we can’t work if we don’t send our kid to school. So we didn’t fully ‘drop out’ of the economy. Participating by not buying things was the protest-‘lite’ that we could manage.
On Wednesday night, I realized it had been a while since I’d bought any food, and that if I didn’t go out and buy milk for the kids, that we wouldn’t have any– so I walked to the liquor store and bought half a gallon. From there, we had to rely on what we had lying around the house, and then, what we had lying around in the school garden (lots of greens, some very bizarre kiwano melons), and what we could find in the neighborhood (oranges knocked out of trees by the storm.) 2 days wasn’t that long to go, and we had a fair amount of random stuff squirreled away, but it still made me think… Even though we eat a lot of homegrown stuff, I wonder if we could do more? And what about the amazing amount of street tree fruit in our neighborhood that goes uneaten (though, especially in loquat season, we do a lot of gleaning also)? I just realized that it wouldn’t be hard to have non-purchased food make up a larger part of our diet than it currently does, and that, by extension, we could be doing a better job on reducing the CO2 from our diet.
This will certainly be something to consider as we move into the next big event for the Women’s March, the #DayWithoutAWoman, which appears to primarily be focused on ‘voting with our dollars’ and making our message known financially.