Black Friday--Just say no!

The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year. It is aptly called "Black Friday", and every year you can read about some poor shopper getting trampled in the mad rush for consumer goods.

Retailers tend to avoid the name "Black Friday" and label the ubiquitous sales for this date as "After-Thanksgiving Sales". Well, I'm not fooled! If people are getting trampled, then "Black Friday" is a better name.

Traditionally Black Friday sales were intended for those starting their Christmas shopping.

While I'm not opposed to giving Christmas presents, as a consumer bankruptcy attorney, I think that limited gift-giving is the best way to go. Every year I see people come into my office having run up thousands of dollars worth of debt from Christmas purchases.

And why? So that their children and relatives will love them more? To make up for a year's worth of neglect and mistreatment? Sadly, it never seems to work out.

I've found that it's better (and cheaper) just to give a small number of and meaningful gifts, enjoy the holiday spirit, and be nice the rest of the year.

However, if you do love to give lots of presents, try supplementing whatever you've already purchased with homemade Christmas candy or baked goods. Not only will you have saved money, but the recipients of these presents will be happy to receive an alternative to yet another sweatshop-made tchotke from one of these horrible megamarts. Can you imagine some third world laborer slaving away so that people in the West can buy cheap Christmas presents from WalMart? Well, that's why the prices there (and other large discount retailers) are so low.

For more information about the evils of Christmas shopping, I recommend this hilarious website, www.revbilly.com Don't worry, it's not religious. The reverend, Bill Talen, is actually a political and environmental activist who publicizes the following:

-Victoria's Dirty Secrets--these catalogues are responsible for huge deforestation of the Canadian forests

-Starbuck's--Rev. Billy reveals how this fake cafe society coffee chain commits environmental violations you couldn't even imagine, apart from the fact that they don't have recycling trash cans in any of their stores. And Starbuck's upper management even removed the nipples from the mermaids on the wallpaper you see in all of their stores, so as not to offend touchy consumers.

-Disneyland--don't even get me started here. I want to go there to see the Christmas lights, but I won't be taking my baby there until he's in grade school. The whole Disney company is all about enticing children to buy into a brand. I want my baby to grow up with his own images of what these ancient mythological characters (Snow White, Cinderella) look like, not blindly accepting some cartoon drawings proffered by Disney's "imagineers".

Reverend Billy actually has a new movie out entitled "What Would Jesus Buy?" It's something we should all think about.

Jen

Transgender Day of Remembrance---November 20th

The Transgender Day of Rememberance must be something new because I had never heard of it until earlier this week, when they were talking about it on NPR. (That's National Public Radio, to the uninitiated--he he).

My late father was a very tolerant man. He had a friend named Betty, who was actually born a man. In some ways Betty made a pretty convincing woman, but for her voice, especially when she laughed. Throughout my childhood my father regaled us with imitations of Betty's girlish laugh, which would get deeper and more masculine the harder she laughed. My father had a good sense of humor, and never missed an opportunity to make Betty laugh. In retrospect, it was kind of a dirty trick to play on her, but it sure was funny!

My point here is that though my father recognized the humor in Betty's situation, as she met head-on the challenges of transforming her appearance from that of a man to a woman, he treated her like a fellow human being. Never as some sort of freak. He used to say about Betty, and her fellow transgender comrades, "Well, the wires just got crossed."

Isn't that a nice thing to say? It certainly is in comparison to the scorn and even violence that transgender people are faced with every day.

Also, when I was about eight years old my mother (a woman with few boundaries)took me to see a movie entitled Outrageous, about a drag queen, and her sad life. I was shocked by the movie, but I felt deep sympathy for the heroine, who acknowledged that she was a bit different, but went out to make a life for herself anyway.

My mother wasn't as tolerant a person as my father was. About Outrageous, all she would say was, "These sad, sad people." "Sad" wasn't necessarily a spontaneous expression of sympathy for those who had been born with the wrong genitalia. "Sad" in this context meant "You make me feel better about myself, because I'm not you!"

Now that I've been practicing law for a while I've had quite a number of transgender clients. Some have had the irreversible genital surgery, some haven't--they just dress the part of the gender they most closely identify themselves with. Their lives are not always easy, and they are often targets for various kinds of discrimination, for housing, employment and just about every other area of life.

What I most appreciate about my transgender clients (most of them, anyway) is their sense of humor and appreciation for life. Almost all of these men and women have been very sweet and funny--very easy to work with. I guess you need to be good natured if you're going to live your life crossing one of society's most sacred boundaries--gender.

What strikes me is how often they are victims of violent hate crimes. I suppose that's who we're supposed to be remembering today, and it's not a bad idea. People are people, and it's very sad to see how many transgenders die violent deaths, either by suicide or by murder.

We may view people with gender variations as "sad" like my mother did, and this may often be the case. But the fact is, all these people were once somebody's baby. They are friends, sons, daughters, parents, and spouses. Hopefully today can be a time of rememberance and increased tolerance for this largely forgotten group of people.

Best Wishes,


Jen