Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Ahh, Thanksgiving: a classic American holiday to spend quality time at home with family, watch football games, not write final papers, and eat and sleep to your heart’s content.
Or is it?
Reading and watching the news this weekend, it seemed that in some parts of this country, the holiday season became a motivation for people to lose all sense of rationality and kill each other for the most senseless reasons.
As reported by numerous news sources, multiple deaths occurred around the United States on Black Friday. First, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, was killed as he opened the doors of a Wal-Mart in Long Island, New York. As soon as the store opened at 5am, the customers rushed in, trampling and killing him. Then, in Palm Desert, California, two men fatally shot each other while shopping in a Toys”R”Us.
I have one question: What is wrong with us?
How have we become so obsessed with mass consumerism that we are willing to kill each other for sales and electronics? It is especially baffling considering most of us don’t even have the money to spend on shopping anymore.
The news reports, of course, were full of people trying to come up with explanations for these awful events. CNN, for example, published this article with the headline “Wal-Mart death preventable, union says”, which cited the lack of security measures as a cause of Damour’s death. Another video featured an interview with a psychologist who blamed “groupthink” to explain the shoppers’ behavior.
Listen, we don’t need to resort to excuses and psychological theories to try to explain what happened this past Friday. During a holiday when we should be at home celebrating with our families and be thankful of our relative peace and prosperity, a few of us are apparently willing to fight and kill each other — all in the name of buying a DVD player.
The explanation is quite simple: we’ve gone bat-shit insane and have lost track of our priorities.
Hopefully we can all take a step back and take some time to reevaluate, so when the next holiday rolls around, other families don’t have to feel the pain and suffering like the Damours, no doubt, are feeling today.
Tags: Jdimytai Damour, Thanksgiving, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart
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December 2nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
What Tae fails to understand is just how good the deals were on Black Friday. Imagine you are responsible for managing a family of six on a 60 thousand dollar a year budget. Could you under normal circumstances ever afford that sweet new 400 dollar Panasonic DVD player with the disc changing remote control? No, not if you plan on feeding your children anything but catsup for the next month. One Wall Mart part-time employee (who for all we know dealt drugs to children) is dead, but thousands got a the last season of “Friends” 40% off. This year I’m grateful that, despite economic reports to the contrary, the American consumer is patriotic enough to take a life if it enables her to own more shit.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:32 am
people can be amazingly selfish and pay more attention to consumer goods than to someone’s health. now the consumer who were in wal-mart on that day are happy with their shoppings, but what would happen if someone from their families died? won’t they start judging everyone for their loss? of course they would…