Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Black Friday, consumerism, death, greed, money, shopping, wal-mart
Jdimytai Damour
A man that I never knew before. In all likelihood, I would have never known of him but for the tragic events that happened five am , Friday morning.
The irony of the matter is that at the same time as he was being trampled by a raging crowd desperate to shop, I was being swept into Macy’s Department store by a rushing crowd. The parallels end there. I was in no danger. There were no chaotic crowds at Macy’s and the New York Police department was there to do what should have been the job of Macy’s security.
At Macy’s, the police told people to back away from the door and told them to cease their attempts to get inside because the store was not open yet.
Over in Valley Stream, according to news reports, the Nassau County police department stated that security was the jurisdiction of Wal-Mart, thus that is why they didn’t do anything about the crowd situation that was definitely getting out of hand. So why did the NYPD do it for Macy’s?
What was Wal-Mart thinking? Green Acres Mall has a had a history of ummm, shall I say, unstable behavior by it’s shoppers. Judging from what goes on at the movie theaters and other parts of the mall, they had to know that security would definitely be an issue on Friday morning.
The crowd itself. As I viewed videos on youtube, it took me back to a particular night in 1974. I attended a basketball game at Hempstead Middle School, a black junior high school and we were playing Oceanside, a white team. We lost that game. The crowd went wild and we (yes, I ran with everybody) went after the white kids that managed to make it to their bus in time. We were out for blood. In a lemming like fury, we stormed out of the school parking lot into Peninsula Boulevard and proceeded to bang on cars and just literally went wild.
A driver tried to run us kids over in retaliation. I was caught up in the excitement and even though I didn’t condone the behavior of what we did, I couldn’t deny the rush of being in chaos like that.
It’s a feel that followed me through life. If there was a fight at a soccer game or a baseball game, I rushed into the fray, heedless of the consequences. It’s that crazed feeling that made me challenge police at riots, not caring about being arrested.
No order, chaos. Some people would mistakenly say anarchy but anarchy doesn’t apply at all. Just simple chaos.
In a time when people are in a frenzy over the economic state of the country. Freaked out about their financial situation, you find people who really don’t give a fuck about right or wrong, they just want what they want.
And where do we place the blame for that? Bad upbringing? A sense of spoiled entitlement? The ongoing desire to keep up with the joneses? The government and the media encouraging people to rush out and spend, spend, spend?
Who do you blame for this tragic death? For surely, there is blame. Greed is number one.
The greed of the crowd to get the savings and the product, the greed of wal-mart who opened only two hours later so that they didn’t miss their chance to make that money.
People were psyched up for this for weeks. Before Halloween passed, I saw Christmas advertisements and decorations up at stores and Christmas products for sale.
The radio blared Christmas music weeks before Thanksgiving and everywhere, from the internet to the newspapers screamed out, SHOP, SHOP, SHOP.
The frenzy set in, the “people” wanted to buy and nobody was getting in their way. “Over my dead body” will take on a new meaning now.
This is not the first shopping frenzy, it’s just the first that I’m aware of that ended in a death. Will it be the last? Will people finally realize how greed corrupts and eventually kills?
I wonder.
Barbara R. Lee
