To the Editor:
Our democratic norms are being eroded day after day, and we cannot stay silent. Corporations, banks, and financial markets rely on consumer spending. If we disrupt the economy for just one day, we send a clear message. The “24-hour Economic Blackout” is a protest action to show our power.
On Friday, February 28, from 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., let’s not make any purchases. Let’s not shop online, or in-store. No Amazon, No Walmart, No Best Buy, Nowhere! Let’s not use credit or debit cards. Let’s only buy essentials if absolutely necessary. If we must spend, let’s only support small, local businesses.
Please participate and spread this message.
CHIARA NAPPI
Clover Lane
When I realized last Saturday was George Washington’s birthday, I looked up former president Bill Clinton’s foreword to Shakespeare in America (Library of America 2013), which refers to Washington leaving the “legislative haggling” at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to see a production of The Tempest, which, as editor James Shapiro points out, was “based on the story of the wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609.” The 42nd president — who remembers a high school assignment requiring him to memorize 100 lines from Macbeth, among them “Life’s but a walking shadow” (“an important early lesson in the perils of blind ambition”) — makes sure to mention the time presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford-upon-Avon. Later in the book, as Abigail Adams recalls, Jefferson “fell upon the ground and kissed it” while Adams “cut a relic from a chair claimed to have belonged to Shakespeare himself.”
