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To the Editor: 

To my “fellow Americans”; 

I prayed for a dream to be realized before voting day, and it seems that the answer to this prayer is coming in a different form than I had imagined. I had hoped more people would get out and vote, and had prayed that no matter how disgusted we were about business as usual, we would still exercise this right. I am feeling let down by the results of this election. But perhaps it is because we still have work to do on a grassroots level and with our consumer votes. 

Now, my challenge to all of my country men and women is to send a message to the corporate criminals by refusing to shop. What if everyone who is so disgusted by this new regime decided to choose only one day out of the month to do something other than go to the store to buy stuff? What if we chose to buy secondhand only for a while? What if we chose to stop driving so much, use mass transit wherever possible, and do recreational activities at home or closer to home, within our own communities? What if we chose to buy items from locally owned small businesses and stopped going to the larger big box blights on the landscape? What if we decided to conserve all of our resources, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because we would not be putting more money into the hands of the corporate criminals? What if we all looked at our options for change and realized that without our money, the minority group of small minded fearful businessmen and women (who seem to need desperately to control everything) would not be getting richer at our expense, and then the power of greed would not be running the show? Perhaps we would all look at the problems of the world in a different way and then we would see we are all in this together.  

If we don't, we will have seen that this human experiment was a good idea while it lasted. Mother Earth will decide to get rid of us (with our cooperation, of course) and start again. Perhaps we will understand next time 

Kathleen Lassiter 

Jenner