Well, for me, Black Friday wasn’t a spend nothing day. I bought some groceries, and I also bought a few Christmas gifts online. I’m glad I wasn’t out in the Christmas rush.
By now, we have all heard that an employee at a Walmart was killed during the Christmas shopping rush. I don’t know which is more horrifying – that people were so eager to get into a store that they knocked down a door and crushed a man or that people saw the man on the ground and stepped over him in their rush to get to the sale items and couldn’t be bothered to stop. A “great deal” on a tv or a gaming system was worth more than stopping to help a man.
I have always thought Christmas was overcommercialized, and am working on a post about that, but I wanted to briefly discuss Black Friday’s events. What does it say about our society that we place so much value on items and material things that we resort to pushing and shoving and fighting. It seems the sort of thing that would happen in an area where people are starving and the “material things” were instead food and water. I can understand why people fight over food and water. I will never understand fighting over a fancy tv.
Even though I wasn’t part of the Black Friday rush, I think that we all, myself included, need to take a step back and really look at our consumerism. Maybe we’re all a little guilty of forgetting what’s really important.
And most people probably didn’t have the money to buy those things and had to put them on credit cards. So they were in a big rush to go deeper into debt. When I was 17, my boss (at the time) commented on how he was STILL paying for a Christmas spending spree he’d gone on two years earlier. That always stayed with me and made quite an impact. I was able to stay at home the whole day, I loved it.
Let me say up front that this is not a defense of what happened. This man died in a terrible way for a terrible reason, and what I’m about to say in no way excuses that.
However, many, if nt most, of the people in the crowd would have been in a position where, if they had stopped to help this man, or even took a moment to go around him, they would have been risking getting trampled as well. In fact, as I recall, several people nearly were (I recall hearing about a woman in late stages of her pregnancy getting injured).
So while I would never condone what happened, I do have some compassion for people who were stuck in a kill-or-be-killed situation.