Good grief! Has anyone heard the news today?: Two women got into a fight over a toy in Toys R Us near Palm Springs, California. Their "men" got involved and ended up shooting each other with real guns. Neither one survived. How do these men entered a children's store with real guns? How about their surviving children, what a great way of spending their holidays, grieving the loss of their dads! What is going on with people today? Do the holidays bring the worst of us? Is it stress that makes us act irrationally? Is it the economy? The second story in the papers today, a temp employee working at a Walmart somewhere in the east coast gets ran over by a mob of people waiting for the doors to open at 5:30 AM. Poor guy, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I read that the mob managed to break the doors with the pressure of the stampede...Despite these sad news about human character I adventured to take my 15 year old daughter to the mall. She wanted to "experience" black Friday. As I followed her from store to store, I saw the faces of people, mostly with robotic expressions of pain, hurried, sadness. In contrast the holiday music was playing all over the mall. I tried to get in the "spirit" but opted for quietly praying for peace and sanity across the globe. While the materialistic side of me struggled with making sense of the newest fashions imagining myself on that outfit or this other one.
At the end I realized that my spiritual awakening journey (which started a couple of years ago) was getting in the way. I sense of detachment from my sensorial me was present. This awareness stopped me from getting too excited about clothes, shoes, etc and I did not mind. I shared these feelings with my daughter to which she responded: "You do not know what you are missing" (by then she has bought several outfits). Driving home was silent and each remained with our own thoughts. I felt a sense of wonder embracing the experience where my soul rested in the spirit and my body rested from consumerism.
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I 'miss out' on these things too. I love clothes and fashion but I'd rather go to H&M on a quiet day and then to a vintage store for an accessory afterward than deal with any kind of busy arena, on any busy shopping day, especially black Friday. I agree that malls can be exciting this time of year - Christmas music, sales and the like. But no-one seems happy. They merely march from store to store and get it over with. On the rare occasion I'm at these malls or busy shopping strips, I always carry a sense of urgency to get home to my family. It's not like I'm so deep and spiritual that I don't 'get' why people love to shop or that I'm above it all. I get it. I just don't like the crowds and the ill-temperament of the shoppers around me. If people love to stop so much, why do they look so unhappy?
The incidences that you recount surely show us that something is really wrong with our society. Even those infamous Russian breadlines in the 1980s were more civil.
Two men with guns in a toy store were obviously prepared (or looking for?) trouble. Trouble, in this case, meaning fighting over a toy. Although I imagine this mindset would allow them to fight over a plastic bag the same way.
I think this has less to do with consumerism or materialism (although that's certainly a factor). This is about the 'Me' factor, and how 'I' have to win at all costs. Including life. This is ego, greed and self-entitlement, mixed with aggression and disregard for human life. The toy doesn't matter and it never will. It's probably a mass produced battery operated something-or-other that'll be 75% off in the new year and unused by the child by spring. What mattered was winning, at any cost. So that we could sit home with our piece of battery-operated plastic and feel somehow that we won, that we're vindicated.
Last night I asked my husband what have we become, as a people, for this to happen. There is no sense to talk about buyer-fatigue, social pressure to acquire the latest products, political pressure to drive up the economy or that Daddy just wanted to make his kid happy and it all went terribly wrong, somehow. This is selfishness and madness. I rather think these men were in the mood for mayhem anyway, regardless of where they were. Who goes to a toy store, armed? Had these men not shot up a store, maybe it would have been a parking lot, or even their own home.
The people involved (who survived) should be deeply ashamed. And perhaps criminally liable. And the true victims, as always, are the kids.
I'm also so sorry for that Wal-Mart employee. His family will now spend this season of goodwill, knowing he died because someone wanted a roll-back price on a piece of plastic.
I just shake my head, because I don't have answers. Yesterday, we didn't even go out, like we normally do, to some activity or trip. We lit the fire and stayed home and watched movies and ate leftovers. Is this what we have to do nowadays, to be safe on 'Black Friday'? Is it all worth it? Lining up like sheep in the middle of the night, in freezing temperatures, suffering rudeness and chaos and then running blind to grab anything that's on sale? I'll stay and home and spend the extra ten bucks later.
What has happened to us as a society - when life has become as cheap and disposable as the toys we gift our children?
November 29, 2008 - 6:21amThis Comment
I think there is absolutely no spiritual component to Black Friday. My thoughts and prayers are with Wal-mart and their employee who died. I now understand why it is called Black Friday.
November 29, 2008 - 12:17pmI actually like shopping, don't mind busy malls or toy stores, and have occasionally braved "Black Friday" to get a great price on something like a digital camera that's 50 percent off before 11 a.m.
However, when I heard about the Wal-Mart employee who was trampled and died, I was so very ashamed of all those people who DID NOT STOP AND HELP HIM. How could that be? If you were the third or fifth or twentieth person in the door, and you saw someone hurt or lying there, how could you not stop and help? How could you step over someone on the floor? How can you not immediately see that this human is more important than anything that's discounted at 5:30 a.m.?
Apparently the crowd in line at that Wal-Mart had been building all night long. Police were called for crowd control at 3:30 a.m., but were no longer there when the store opened. As the crowd -- about 2,000 strong -- started beating on the doors before 5, the doors shattered and the crowd rushed inside -- and over the employee who was killed. Some customers tried to help, but others streamed over and around the employee in order to get to the merchandise. Here's the New York Times story about the incident:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/business/29walmart.html?em
I hope the people who rushed that Wal-Mart door and then streamed past the injured employee never stop feeling ashamed of what they did. A mob mentality is a dangerous thing, and when it is combined with the practice of encouraging customers to "compete" for a discount, situations can easily get out of hand. The two men in the Toys R Us should not have been armed, but at least innocent bystanders weren't harmed (as they so easily could have been). The Wal-Mart employee was just trying to do his job, and now he's dead.
December 1, 2008 - 9:55amI actually heard the Wal-Mart employee who died did so trying to help a pregnant woman from not getting crushed.
December 6, 2008 - 3:49am