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 actually heard the Wal-Mart employee who died did so trying to help a pregnant woman from not getting crushed.
December 6, 2008 - 3:49amThis Comment
I 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 - 9:55amThis 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 - 12:17pmThis Comment