Jesus Goes Shopping

I spent the afternoon yesterday writing content for a website about dips. A few weeks before, the business owner had asked me if I would consider a contra deal - content in exchange for dips. If I could pay my mortgage with food, I told her, I would love to.

Maybe that's the direction we are all headed.

The vision of Adam Grubb, founding editor of EnergyBulletin.net, a site dedicated to the proposition that oil output has peaked and that our current way of life will inevitably change, looked decidedly apocalyptic. His vision was of a suburban wasteland where abandoned McMansions are raided for their copper wiring, where people lose their homes and are forced to live out of cars and destitute communities rely on neighbourhood trading to survive.

Last night we watched What Would Jesus Buy?, a film about Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, who, like missionaries, travel across the US preaching their anti-consumerist values.

You see them trundle through mall after mall, in the days leading up to Christmas, attempting to get their message through to the shopping throngs lining up for their Nintendo Wiis.

"This is why we need to have a crash," PJ says.

This is why we are growing our own vegetables.