Friday, November 28, 2008

Black Friday

Wal-Mart Worker Dies in Rush

While doing my own Black Friday shopping (just to keep this fair), I stumbled upon an Amazon.com discussion on this article. Naturally the purpose of this discussion was to establish blame, and its placement was fairly evenly split between those who blamed corporations for inspiring this level of rabid consumerism and those who blamed the crowd for losing control.

What do you think?

4 comments:

Sean said...

"You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape."

Paupertas said...

My wife as well as I stumbled across this article, she was appalled, and I was not surprised. It is amazing how ridiculous people act to save a small amount of money. Every deal that walmart had was matched or better on other online stores.

This is why I don't want my children growing up to spend all their time and money on silly capitalistic consumerism ideals. I spoke with my friends from Europe and they found this article to be absurd, and further degraded the small amount of admiration they had left for the "states."

I'm glad I was home sleeping.. I should have took my video camera and staged a corrida de toros, except with people. Could have been fun.

Tyler said...

Who is to blame? I blame YOU! You see, if you didn't post this story, I would have never heard about it, and therefore, it would have never occurred.

* * *

As sad and appalling as this story is, I do find humor in visualizing the Wal-Mart employee who looked up, saw the raging mob ready to tear down the store, and then, against his better judgment, unlocked the door and pressed "OPEN" at precisely the moment the store was scheduled to open.

Sean said...

Listen, I'm not allowing write-ins on this ballot. You're either electing The Corporation or The Individual to the Seat of Blame. Neither myself or the employee are up for election. If you are an idealist, then you can blame the shoppers who murdered the guy for believing that their bodies had mass. IT'S STILL THEIR FAULT.

The Amazon discussion was interesting - people were reacting violently to the idea that Walmart should be to blame. They said that our society is sick in the way that it always forces blame on something else other than ourselves. In that sense, they're right: even if corporations have deviously taken over our very will to live, we are to blame for allowing them to do so (and continue to do so). Somehow, though, I feel like they're really just protecting the corporation in the same (ok, not at all the same) way that Jensen talks about people defending the supermarket: without Black Friday how will there be Christmas? And without Christmas, how will there be salvation through Christ?

It all makes sense now.