Black

[Note to the reader: The following post eschews the typical tongue-in-cheek tone often seen in these posts. I thought you should be alerted up front.]

On Friday evening we heard reports on the news about an incident on Long Island where a Walmart employee was trampled to death by shoppers who had pushed down the doors in the very early morning hours. It was entirely possible that the ones in the front were pushed by the crushing weight of those behind them without intending to bust in and run over another human being. It's obvious that the store had inadequate security. However, in the end, someone was dead, and it could be traced directly to the abject perversion of the "holiday spirit" that all the sales on the so-called Black Friday have transformed it into.

At the time and still now when I think about this my jaw clenches involuntarily. My teeth grind against each other. It takes a conscious effort to make it stop.

I don't know the man who died. I live thousands of miles away. I wasn't anywhere near to a shopping center that day. You couldn't pay me to go to the mall or a shopping center on that day of the year. I should be able to maintain a level of emotional distance in this scenario. However, clearly it gets to me.

Obviously my kneejerk reaction is that all involved should just be taken out and shot. No trial, no excuses—just line 'em up and don't stop until we run out of bullets. Make them dig their own graves first, of course.

But that's not right.

It's entirely possible that the people who caused this man to die are racked with guilt now. I would be lying if I said it wouldn't be at least somewhat satisfying to know that much was the case. But I don't know them. I'll never know any of them. And obviously it's best that it stays that way.

But I'm not here to vilify them. It's a tragedy, but they cannot undo what was done. They will have to live with what they were involved in for the rest of their lives, and possibly farther than that (depending on one's beliefs about the afterlife).

I'm just admitting that unlike so many other tragedies that I hear about on the news (many of which are arguably even worse—although to rank tragedies is undoubtedly amongst the most abjectly macabre things one can do, so I insist on pointing out I don't mean to imply anything that seems to undermine the severity of all tragedies) this one didn't merely elicit a response of "oh-how-terrible" but of visceral anger—much more visceral than would rationally be justified.

(To the extent that anger can be "rationally justified," yes; the terms may be somewhat incompatible under semantic analysis.)

I suppose when I started this I figured at some point along the process of writing about it something would come to mind to make some sense of it, but there's no making sense of it. Not now, not ever.

I guess my reaction may reveal something about my feelings about the "holiday season"—which would be that at this point in my life, with no children, it's something that I could take or leave. I don't mind the family get-togethers; those are the part I enjoy.

But the gift-giving clearly seems to have transcended acknowledging those one cares about when it involves congregating outside a retail store in the pre-dawn hours (possibly waiting there for days) not to procure food or medical supplies but to get a bargain on a flat-screen TV or a cashmere sweater, and then having the crowd mentality turn into a mob that is so sub-consciously convinced that the success of their holiday is based on getting in the store so soon that it involves trampling another person, that I cannot help but consider the epitome of what is wrong with this time of year.

It's overly melodramatic to say the "black" in Black Friday is in the human soul. I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on the soul. The soul isn't the part of the body that makes these decisions, not the part that inspires retailers to open at ridiculously earlier and earlier hours with limited numbers of "specially priced" items to entice people to sleep outside their doors, that's not the part of the body that suppresses the memory of how awful everyone was to each other at the mall last year and goes out and shops at those ungodly hours anyway. No, that's the grey matter between the ears, controlling the arms that shove others out of the way, that considers it a victory to have snagged some material item (that will be outdated in a couple years) away from some other fool up at that hour.

(Yes, I've adopted a judgmental tone. It was inevitable, given the vitriol I noted earlier, with the whole line-'em-up-and-shoot-'em line.)

Anyway, I have to imagine that if Christ was watching the news last week, He had to be screaming, "THAT'S NOT WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT!" (Not that I presume to know what the one whose birth is ostensibly celebrated in this season would do, but I hope you know what I mean by that.)

Of course, that lament of over-commercialization of Xmas goes back to well before I was even born. That's nothing new.

So, to conclude, I've concluded nothing. Perhaps it's merely that I hit the point where I couldn't be jaded any more, and it turned to anger.

Of course, I was able to suppress that anger without, oh, you know, trampling anyone, so I don't feel too bad. I'm not saying it makes me better than everyone—just that it makes me better than the people who couldn't use their brains better to prevent the death of a man who did nothing worse than be at work. And all it would have taken is not buy into the illusion that Christmas is supposed to be an orgy of spending.

Yeah. I need to stop now.