welcome, jesus

i'd like to take this time to welcome the baby jesus to earth.

i think the best way to do this is by shooting the man next to me in the check-out for grabbing the last webkin toy that my little darling just has to have.

i'm referring to the outbreak in violence this black friday. what brought on the trampling of the wal-mart worker in long island? and the two men who shot and killed each other at toys-r-us in california? is it perhaps the allure of great savings against a backdrop of financial woes? could these customers-turned-savages really only afford The Perfect Gift on black friday and not in the days after?

whatever the "rational" reason for the three deaths that occurred (and possibly more) i am completely outraged that we would allow consumerism to infect our value systems to this degree.

like any other news story, i got a very different picture of the events that unfolded in long island from reading a european paper and an american one. according to the belfast telegrah "about a thousand" shoppers "ripped off the doors" of the wal-mart at about "5 am." then this chilling image follows:

"...the customers stepped over the dead man and became angry when told the store would be closing because of his death..."

stepped over the dead man? became angry?? now i'm no expert on psychology, but it seems like it must've taken a hell of a lot more than simple heard mentality to cause this kind of reaction in a crowd of nearly 2,000 people.

the disgusting part about it is that this man, jdimytai damour, 34, is dead. his family will never see him again. but those people..if you can call them that...that trampled him to death will still get what's on their shopping lists. wal-mart will still make killer profits this quarter and not even this tragedy will stop the machine that is consumerism in this country. i wish i felt that damour's death would act as a social catalyst, and cause people to look at their spending, and how their over-consumption is poisoning our communities, but i know that very little so far has come of it, save this response from wal-mart:

"unfortunate."

unfortunate? it's unfortunate when i forget my cell phone charger and my phone dies, or it rains and i don't have an umbrella, or i try to go to a movie and it's sold out, or my favorite baseball team blows the world series. what happened to jdimytai was horrible and inhumane. plain and simple.

damour, judging by the name was either a first-generation american, or an immigrant (maybe even a migrant worker), and so to the people that trampled over him in the wal-mart he and his labor was invisible. low-wage workers are the indentured servants of today - mainly will never escape these service sector jobs and rise to the middle class.

i am reminded again and again of how the american dream is a downright myth - for both those that trampled damour in literal search for some item to symbolize their ascension into middle-class status, and for workers like damour who will never afford the items that they sell.

i'll stop here with these lyrics that i heard in my own toy store today:

and so this is christmas
for weak and for strong
for rich and for poor ones
the world is so wrong
and so happy christmas
for black and for white
for yellow and red ones
let's stop all the fight
a very merry christmas
and a happy new year
let's hope it's a good one
without any fear

here's hoping i can manage to find the babe lying in a manger, born to a single mother, out of wedlock, on welfare, squatting in a farmer's barn.