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MY WORD - 11/30/2008
(by Holly Stewart - OpEd Columnist - December 02, 2008)
Black Friday turns darker
Man is a wanting animal – as soon as one of his needs is satisfied, another appears in its place. This process is unending. It continues from birth to death. – Douglas McGregor
American consumerism reached a new low last week when a Wal-Mart worker in Valley Stream, Long Island was trampled to death by an overeager crowd of early morning shoppers. An estimated 2,000 people had gathered outside the store by 5 a.m. Friday, many of them rowdy and chanting “push the doors in!”
Meanwhile, workers inside formed a human chain in an effort to quell the surging mob. It didn’t succeed. After the melee subsided, 34-year old Jdimytai Damour was dead and several others wounded, including a woman who was eight months pregnant.
Elsewhere in the country, reports of people jumping over one another for so-called “door-buster” bargains and a gang-related shooting went mostly unreported on national news outlets, but no surprise there. Let’s not scare off the already-timid shopping contingent. Good grief! What on earth would cause people to act this way?
Exactly 29 years ago, we were asking ourselves the same thing in the wake of a terrible tragedy in Cincinnati. Eleven young people were trampled to death at a concert given by The Who at Riverfront Coliseum on Dec. 3, 1979. This venue had already experienced a few close calls with the rowdy crowds that came to see Led Zeppelin earlier that same year. The horror of the event forced the rock concert industry to rethink its security and ticketing techniques, forever banning general-admission seating at indoor arenas.
I can almost understand being so excited to see one of my favorite bands play live that I would become agitated and aggressive while waiting for the doors to open. Combine youthful exuberance (or impatience) with alcohol (as well as other substances) and you are likely to get mixed results bordering on violence. But to get that hostile about your holiday shopping, are you kidding? Just to save a couple hundred dollars on a piece of electronic equipment? When did shopping become a contact sport in this country?
Perhaps these folks just feel they are doing their patriotic duty by putting their money where their desires are. G.W. Bush did tell us all to go shopping after 9/11. And now that our economy is in free fall, the engineers behind this nightmare are still encouraging us to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. It’s the American way. Our entire economy is based on it, apparently. Consume or die. In this case, however, it’s consume AND die.
A video of the crowd in front of the Valley Stream Wal-Mart is available for viewing on the Web. Because most of the faces in it are dark-skinned, some bloggers are trying to turn it into a racially motivated event. I would remind them, however, that 99 percent of the people rushing The Who concert all those years ago were white. The idiocy of humanity in large groups knows no racial boundaries; we are all susceptible to the sinister side of mob behavior.
As easy as it would be to blame Wal-Mart for this fiasco, I’m going to abstain this time around. This incident is but one indication of a much larger problem in our culture. What really needs to be addressed is not the way individual retailers handle crowds, but why consumers behave this way in the thrill of the hunt. Is it really that exciting to save 200 bucks on a new television when there’s nothing wrong with your old one? Can you actually not wait a few more hours to own some stupid game or gadget the moment it is commercially available? How pathetic is humanity?
So much for the true meaning of the holiday season. To paraphrase a popular Christian adage, what “door-buster” would Jesus wait on line to buy? I think he would forego the material aspect altogether. Instead he would make online donations to worthy charities in his loved ones’ names and spend Christmas Day feeding the poor at a local soup kitchen.
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