| Last
week, I wrote a column about a nineteen
year old boy in Florida who committed suicide on the internet and only one of
the thousands who were watching this take place bothered to call the police. Oh,
and did I mention that the young man posted his name and address? What a shame.
This week I wanted to write something about the upcoming holiday season
and try to be in a more upbeat festive mood, but things just keep getting in my
way. I really did have good intentions.
So what am I going to discuss this
week?
Holiday shopping at its worst.
The day after Thanksgiving,
up in someplace called Valley Stream, New York a Wal-Mart employee was trampled
to death by the crowds rushing in to buy their on sale Christmas items. The police
had been called to the store at 3:30 in the morning to help with crowd control.
By 5:30 am the crowd was out of control and had become what one observer called
a ‘rabble’. Wal-Mart workers tried to calm the crowd down but had no success.
The glass to the doors shattered from the force of the 2,000 customers and as
the mob made its way into the building, one 34 year old Wal-Mart worker was crushed
to death as the ‘holiday’ crowd rushed over him.
Four other people, including
one pregnant woman were injured and taken to a local hospital.
No wonder
other parts of the world have a low opinion of our country.
I’ve read reports where people in some parts of the world are living on less than
a dollar a day. What do you think goes on in their minds when they read that Americans
are stampeding over each other to buy flat screen televisions and other Christmas
presents while they were on sale. The people in other countries are fighting over
each other for food and a chance to survive, not game boys, cd’s, tank tops and
tennis shoes.
To add insult to injury, when the police arrived and wanted
to close the store since it was a crime scene, many of the customers refused to
leave and told the officers they weren’t going until they had finished shopping
because they stood in line for so long and didn’t think it was fair to make them
leave.
I’ll bet the dead guy didn’t think it was fair either.
I
have been fortunate to have never been in a crowd as wild as this appeared to
be, but I can tell you that if I were to enter a store or anywhere else for that
matter and felt myself walking over a body, I do believe I would be aware of it
and would want to either help or get some help for whoever was laying on the ground.
How could you not notice that you were or had been stepping on another human body?
Are
Christmas gifts so important that people need to wait outside of some building
for hours on end and then participate in the unnecessary murder of a store worker?
I don’t know about you, but if I had been there, I think I would have wanted to
go on home and call it a day and forget the shopping until some other time. No
gift I have ever bought is worth someone’s life.
Come to think of it,
the best gifts I have even been given have been simple, even homemade, not some
expensive do-dad that was the hottest thing on the market that year.
Perhaps
we need to step back and look at the real reason we even celebrate this time of
the year. It isn’t about the gifts or what they mean, it’s about relationships.
It’s telling our friends and family that we are thinking of them and that we love
them. Why do we send Christmas cards in the first place? Because it’s simply to
let people know that even though we haven’t talked to them for a year or so, we
still consider them to be our friends.
It certainly isn’t about a gift
on sale at some store where you have to stand in line for hours and then some
poor unsuspecting clerk gets killed while trying to do his job. The people who
find nothing wrong with their behavior should not be called shoppers, they should
be called savages.
They don’t deserve Christmas.
©
Peary Perry
Letters From North America December
10, 2008 column
Syndicated weekly in 80 newspapers
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com
Related Topic: Christmas
in Texas |
