Christmas Shopping and bombings

I’ve been trying to get my Christmas shopping done this year, and last weekend I think I knocked most of it out. Getting older means a lot of things, but it for sure means that I have more people to buy gifts for and that I better make sure I get them something nice. Gone are the days of children when we could wake up on Christmas day and just wonder what other people got us. I remember buying my parents useless stuff from the “store” that they would set up at school. It had a name but I can’t remember what we called it. Someone would bring in a bunch of junk really and then we would go with our class to the store and buy things for mom and dad with the money they gave us. I can’t remember anything specific that I bought but I am sure that they all were stellar gifts.
I was saddened and shocked to hear the news of the death of the Wal-Mart worker in the stampede of people on Black Friday. Have we as a people come to that? What is wrong with us that we wait in lines for hours to buy things for people that they don’t need with money that we don’t have? That is a different argument all together, and right now I am just thinking about what must have been going through the people’s heads when they heard about the injured worker. Some sites are saying that when people were asked to leave they refused and shouted about how they had been waiting in line to go shopping all morning. A man died and we kept shopping.
Normally when we hear about how our shopping practices oppress and enslave others it is usually in the context of buying sweatshop clothes and shoes and things of the like. It usually doesn’t refer to the way we run through doors and crush a man to death just in order to get this year’s hot item.
I don't know what to think about it all really. It is really embarrassing that something like that happened in America, and also that Wal-Mart couldn’t even bear to shut its doors for the entire day. Making money is so important that we just scoop up the dead, take a few pictures, and then brush the incident aside so it won't affect our numbers for the day…the busiest shopping day of the year.
It really just makes you sick. I guess its something for us all to reflect on. And the next time we hear about bombings in the Middle East and killings around the world and we are tempted to say, “You just can’t reason with those people, they have no value for human life!”—we can stop and think about how we trampled a man to death just so we could buy toys.