I have stuff. I can’t deny it. I do like my suet and seeds, and I like to have the proper serving dishes and utensils. I also have a large flat-screen TV: a whopping 13 inches! It barely fits in my nest.
But there’s stuff, and then there’s stuff. I can’t come down on holiday shoppers in this country from an ascetic angle, but I feel like I can say something from a humanity standpoint—and I’m not even human.
While there weren’t any mob deaths I could see related to this past Black Friday—that post-Thanksgiving all-out shopping-sale day that generates literally bloodthirsty crowds—I did see that a young girl was trampled and sent to the hospital in Ohio. There were also some brawls and arrests, some stabbings and shootings. All in the name of acquiring more stuff.
No deal on a bit of fancy electronics or sparkly piece of jewelry is worth a bullet in the shoulder. Or a boot in the back.
The sorts of incidents listed at blackfridaydeathcount.com represent several problems: our culture’s obsession with consumerism; our relationship to money, in that we’re all so desperate for deals just to save a few bucks; our disregard for our neighbors as we aim to make sure we get what we feel is coming to us.
Here’s a line from a story (taken from The San Bernardino County Sun, which is a fabulous name for a newspaper) about a fight that broke out in Rialto late Nov. 28: “A Walmart manager said the doors were originally scheduled to open at 8 p.m. but with the more than 5,000 people in line they made the decision to open the doors early leaving nearly 1,500 people waiting in line to get in the store, which police said led to the melee.”
It also led to a police officer getting a broken wrist. Two separate fights then broke out inside, one over a—yeah—flat-screen TV.
A corporate spokesperson said it was “an otherwise very safe event.”
Aside from three confrontations that required intervention, one of which sent an officer to the hospital? OK, sure.
And remember, that was just one store in one city on one night—before Black Friday itself even really got going.
The answer to this is not more police or better ways to organize lines snaking their ways into big-box stores. The answer is for us to change our relationship to the stuff we buy—and to each other.
I’m not the first writer to say this, and sadly I won’t be the last. But until the message finally gets through, we can look forward to many more dark Fridays in the future.
The Canary stayed home all Nov. 29. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 5-12, 2013.
