America remembers only what is convenient. We remember the parade but not the protest lines. We remember the dream, not the demand. We remember victory speeches, but not the empty stomachs that came before them.
But every generation reaches a breaking point – a moment when the gap between what we are told and what we are experiencing becomes too great to ignore. When that moment comes, people don’t whisper – they step back.
That moment is here.
What if, this year, on the day they expect us to spend the most, we decided not to spend anything? No lines snaking around big box stores. There are no algorithms running to predict our purchases. No advertising is selling the illusion that happiness can be bought. Absolute calm – the kind of calm that feels like power.
We can do this if we black out Black Friday.
This is not meant to encourage anger or destruction, but rather a collective pause that says, “You have benefited greatly from our patience.”
For too long, America has confused obedience with peace. We are told that progress requires humility, that fairness can wait until it becomes convenient for the comfortable. But nothing changes until the people who built the country decide to stop building for free.
In 1955, Montgomery, Ala. The people of America proved that power can look like peace. They walked instead of riding and brought a city to its knees. he boycotted 381 days – Enough time for the nation to learn that silence, when disciplined, is not absence – it is action.
Now, almost 70 years later, we are being called again. The battleground has shifted from bus depots to checkout counters, from individual eateries to online carts. But the weapon is the same: withdrawal.
When Martin Luther King spoke economic justiceHe warned that integration without equality was an empty promise. He understood that there was no point sitting at a lunch counter if you couldn’t afford the food. What is Black Friday if not a national lunch counter – where everyone is invited to consume, but not everyone is allowed to thrive?
Corporate profits have doubled In the last 14 years. real wages speed is not maintainednow the top one percent They own almost half of all wealthWhile the rest of us trade hours to survive. This is not the invisible hand of the market. This is the direct fist of greed.
And in this moment – this delicate, fracturing moment – I have to say something I never imagined I would: I apologize to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
In 2017, I criticized Sanders “Not even a Democrat,“And as someone “Breaking up our party.” I argued that his movement was dividing the Democratic coalition, that his refusal to compromise would hurt our progress. I was wrong.
What I called division was actually vision. What I thought was stubbornness was moral stability. Sanders wasn’t trying to destroy the party. He was trying to wake it up.
He saw, long before many of us, how the machinery of capitalism was quietly strangling democracy. He understood that a party funded by Wall Street could never fully serve Main Street. He was not rejecting the Democrats; He was challenging us to remember what we said we were fighting for.
Now, as billionaires build rockets while working people can’t afford rent, we need her voice more than ever — not as a candidate, but as a compass. It is no longer about ideology. It’s about survival.
If 10 million Americans stopped their spending for a day, losses could reach billions. This is not chaos: this is the result. This is what it looks like when ordinary people decide to make themselves heard – not through noise, but through peace.
Blackout is not a Black Friday boycott. It’s a blessing – a reminder that our worth is not measured by what we buy, but by what we create together.
This is proof that we are still a nation capable of acting ethically. The same spirit that marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge still beats beneath the skin of this country, waiting to be summoned.
Because the fight for freedom was never limited to just the right to vote. It was about the right to matter – to stand up in the marketplace of democracy and declare, “We are not for sale.”
So let them count their profits. We will count on something else – our unity, our will, our quiet strength.
And when they ask what happened this Black Friday, tell them America stopped. Tell them that this silence was the voice of a nation that was once again learning how to stand.
Michael Starr Hopkins is a former senior congressional aide and presidential campaign spokesperson.
