By Dave Kinnamon, columnist
Of the 365 individual days in a standard calendar year, none more completely epitomizes American greed and misplaced American values than the shopping day after Thanksgiving known as Black Friday.
On Friday, moments after the store opening at 5 a.m., a 34-year-old male Wal-Mart temp quite literally was trampled to death by the mob of shoppers pushing and bum-rushing their way into the store as the man unlocked the doors. The Wal-Mart is located in Long Island, New York. The local Wal-Mart managers closed the store for a couple of hours after the man was rushed off to the local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. While Nassau County police authorities filled in their reports and gathered evidence from the trampling — also from which a 28-year-old pregnant woman and three others were forced to seek medical treatment.
“Shoppers were on a full-out run into the store,” one Nassau County policeman reported.
That same day, two people were shot and killed inside a Toys ’R Us store in Palm Desert, Calif.
What is wrong with America? What specific notions and morals so tragically are warped and/or bent amongst America’s priorities and values?
Greed, selfishness, smug disregard for others, grossness ... the list goes on and on.
“Black Friday” refers not only to the masses of shoppers and the mayhem and disorder they create (similar to the Black Thursday of the stock market crash), but also to the notion this one shopping day per year can lift a retailer into “the black,” or profitability, for the year.
The basic concept behind Black Friday is the giant retailer offers some limited sale and other door incentives ($5 gift cards, for example) to entice Christmas shoppers to arrive and begin their shopping as soon as the store opens, usually at 5 a.m. on Black Friday, but some stores opened at midnight this year.
“Rush and grab” is the motivating philosophy — if you can call it a philosophy (more like madness) — behind the hordes of ravenous holiday shoppers. Historians have written time and again about how terrible events cause humans to act their most terrible to one another. In Holocaust histories, one can read of Jews who turned against their own and assisted the Nazis in exterminating their own people for an extra ration of stew per day.
I think holiday shopping brings out the grotesque edges of American capitalism. I used to say new car dealerships were the most perfect expression of American capitalism at work.
I’ve changed my mind. Black Friday is the most perfect expression of American capitalism at work.
On a brighter note, Thursday we celebrated Thanksgiving, one of the most popular family holidays in the U.S. Its core symbol — a family sitting around a table full of tasty, hot food — resonates deep within all of us, striking mystic chords going all the way back to infancy.
There are other popular holidays, of course. Independence Day, Labor Day, Halloween and others, but they don’t capture the essence of family togetherness as Thanksgiving does. Thanksgiving is about breaking bread together as a family. The important aspect of Thanksgiving is the family togetherness. And the food. Ah, the food.
On Thanksgiving, tradition demands we set aside petty squabbles and differences with relatives and join them in familial fellowship and good will. We force ourselves to find common ground with and exchange pleasantries with relatives we actively dislike in our minds. Getting along with in-laws sometimes raises even more difficulties and issues of diplomacy. It’s almost an unwritten Biblical commandment a man must say nice things to and about his mother-in-law, even if he doesn’t truly believe them.
Thanksgiving is an expression offered up at times in prayer. I have heard ministers use the term many times. I assumed thanksgiving as a prayer term traced all the way back to the Old Testament, but according to Dictionary.com, “thanksgiving” as a term has only been around since the 1500s and means these things: “1. The act of giving thanks; grateful acknowledgment of benefits or favors, esp. to God. 2. An expression of thanks, esp. to God. 3. A day set apart for giving thanks to God.”
Thanksgiving has been observed annually as a national holiday since President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation in 1863 designating the last Thursday in November as such. Thanksgiving Day became a federal holiday by act of Congress in 1941.
A journalist I greatly admire, Joe Galloway, says he is grateful for every day he has lived since the Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam in November 1965, because so many Americans around him died during that battle. I like to invest at least part of the holiday finding God-given blessings like Galloway’s for which to offer thanksgiving.
Kinnamon is a staff writer for the News & Eagle. Contact him at dave.kinnamon@sbc global.net.
