News from the New York Times reporting on the “biggest” shopping day of the year.
> A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.
> At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. . . .
> People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.
> “They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”
Nuff said.
Very well put, John. This is a very tragic and painful story about how consumerism has run amok to such a point where a young man’s life is snuffed out, sacrificed on the altar of the almighty corporate-inspired frenzy to buy, buy, buy. These shoppers behaved like animals, losing all awareness of their own humanness, not caring at all about the plight of the person they callously trampled.