"A Wal-Mart employee in Long Island, New York died after being trampled to death by a mob of
shoppers on Friday, the traditional first day of the holiday shopping season. The 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour was killed after a crowd of 2,000 broke down store doors and ran over him shortly before the store"s schedule 5 a.m. opening. Four shoppers were injured in the stampede. Nassau County police were trying to determine what happened during the stampede, but said it was unclear if there would be any criminal charges." (from Democracy Now website: democracynow.org)No matter how you paint the current economic crisis in America, the corpse of a Walmart worker bears the truth: it's all been built on a platform of consumer spending, artificial hype and a false assumption of "value." What else could account for the fact that a horde of shoppers (who probably all think of themselves as very nice people...some of them probably even go to church!) could trample to DEATH a human being so that they could get a blender for $5? (a blender just like the one they could have purchased at their neighbor's yard sale last week for $2!).
And what's worse....people didn't stop. When it became clear that something had gone terribly wrong (hmmm...what gave it away, the fact that the crowd ripped the door off the store and shattered the glass? Or maybe it was the fact that there had been an attack on that line earlier, one for which the police had to be called?) they just kept on pushing. That cheap TV, that blender, that toaster, that WHATEVER, was more important than a human life. Even when it became clear that the store had become a crime scene, people continued to rush around looking for bargains.
Have we no shame?
It is the marketplace at work. It is profits before people. It is senseless global profit-seeking on behalf of absentee stockholders. It is "trickle down" economics in all its naked glory.
It is insanity.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment