A Wal-Mart employee in Nassau, NY was murdered by shoppers breaking down the doors and trampling anyone who fell down in their focused drive to get to the Black Friday bargains offered at the discount chain.<\/p>\n
I don’t know how any of them feel.\u00a0 I’d bet a lot of ’em feel pretty damn shocked and horrified.\u00a0 In fact, I’m even willing to bet that most of ’em are trying to convince themselves they were in the wrong part of the crowd to have stepped on the temporary employee hired for the holiday season.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m none of them want to think it’s their foot that dealt the death blow.<\/p>\n
This is not going to be a piece decrying materialism.\u00a0 As far as I am concerned, anyone writing a piece on a laptop with her iPod syncing to her electronic music collection who is also mentally debating whether nor to to make herself an espresso from a machine she has in her kitchen has no right to sneer at materialism.<\/p>\n
I don’t think it’s materialism that did it. \u00a0 It was a rather twisted sort of competitiveness.\u00a0 No, not gonna sneer at competitiveness, either. I’m a self-employed writer.\u00a0 You have to be pretty damn competitive to be able to make a living like that.\u00a0 It’s the twisted part that’s the issue.\u00a0 It’s losing sight of what’s truly important.<\/p>\n
If you do not keep constantly in mind that people are more important than things, your priorities are way out of whack.\u00a0 Anyone willing to participate in a mob scene that knocks people down and ends in a death to get to a sale on something that’s not even necessary to keep you alive has gone from from focusing on people to focusing on things.<\/p>\n
If this had been a bread riot or something like that, I could understand it.\u00a0 But it wasn’t.\u00a0 These weren’t people going hungry here who had a chance at more food.\u00a0 They were more like this guy 500 miles away,<\/p>\n
“Even with the economy, you’ve got to go with the deals,” said Robert Balboni of Centreville, Va., while loading his shopping cart with a 42-inch flat panel TV, a portable DVD player and a Philips 2GB MP3 player.1<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Notice the urgency of the words that were quoted.\u00a0 “Got to”.\u00a0 People are putting survival urgency on non-survival things.\u00a0 The behavior at the Wal-Mart where the employee was murdered was survival behavior applied to a non-survival situation.\u00a0\u00a0 We do it all the time — in relationships, in our business lives, in our home lives.\u00a0 And that’s where the priorities are screwed up.<\/p>\n
\n1<\/sup>http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/11\/28\/news\/economy\/blackfriday_walmart\/?postversion=2008112811<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Wal-Mart employee in Nassau, NY was murdered by shoppers breaking down the doors and trampling anyone who fell down in their focused drive to get to the Black Friday bargains offered at the discount chain. I don’t know how any of them feel.\u00a0 I’d bet a lot of ’em feel pretty damn shocked and … <\/p>\n