Buffalo Gal

Today’s opening shopping day..the traditional day after Thanksgiving Holy Day for Spending and Materialism…turned from "Black" (as in merchants going "in the black" on this day)  to "Bloody" when a Wal Mart employee in Valley Stream, New York was trampled to death by shoppers who pushed into the store, tearing the doors right off their hinges, in their mad rush to buy the current "come hither" electronics products the store had advertised.

I remember video films from other Thanksgiving Fridays in the past when the masses pushed through doors of a Best Buy somewhere to push and shove each other brutally for the sake of grabbing the hottest electronic device of that year.  But nobody got killed as they did today.

A report from a local TV station in the Valley Stream area said this:   "The crowd pushed so forcefully that they crashed the doors down and one of the workers from Walmart was pushed to the floor as the crowd entered the store, many of them running, said Detective Lt. Michael Fleming of the Nassau County Police Department.  Cell phone video obtained by CBS 2 HD shows Jdimytal Damour, a 34 year old part time employee hired as a holiday temp. He was crushed in the onslaught and pronounced dead an hour later…’the man got trampled, stomped on—everybody banged through the doors,’ witness Terrance Howard said….Witness Kimberly Cribbs said ‘all those poeple who got in went right on shopping after the worker was run over.  Oh yes, they are savages,’ Cribb said. "       A pregant 28- year old woman was also knocked down in the frenzy when the doors opened; she was injured but did not miscarry as some reports said early on.

What happens to ordinary people on this day? Why do people turn into uncaring stampeders like a herd of crazed bison?  Why do stores encourage this sort of frenzied behavior by having 4 a.m. openings with the carrot- on- a- stick  to buy the hottest electronic item available?   What role do stores who do not hire enough security play in such a tragedy as was played out today?  We have all heard of "mob behavior" and this is not the first time some Innocent has been trampled to death in a mob riot;  soccer fans are killed regularly in mob riots at championship games around the world in nations where soccer is the national sport.  But being trampled in a frenzy of shopping and spending and doing anything to get one’s hands on some stupid so- called present for someone does not make sense to anyone capable of being sensible—-which the morning’s mob obviously was not! 

The continuing degradation of human beings goes on.  Materialism seems to rule vast majorities of people who engage in these after- Thanksgiving, before- Christmas, after -Christmas orgies of commercialism…or whatever else merchants can think up to get people into their stores at ungodly hours for the sake of killing each other for some Hot Item!!!

There was also mayhem and death in, of all places, a "Toys R Us" store in Palm Desert, California this morning also.  That incident was probably gang-related according to those who witnessed the gunning down of one man by another in a check out line at the toy store chain.  The witnesses, including many children, will never be the same again…count on it.

Today the crazed shopping masses  did kill someone.   One down in Valley Stream, New York, and how many more to go in this increasingly barbaric binge of materialism??