All Is Optional

This year’s much-hyped Black Friday led to the death of a temporary, part-time Wal-Mart employee. Since Wal-Mart doesn’t have unions, no one will be fighting in the name of Jdimytai Damour, 34, Jamaica, Queens.

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Doesn’t Jdimytai deserve our respect? Doesn’t he deserve the same treatment we would want for anyone of our loved one’s? After all, he wasn’t working at Wal-Mart on the year’s biggest shopping day for fun.

Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.

Four other people, including a 28-year-old woman who was described as eight months pregnant, were treated at the hospital for minor injuries.

It’s in these moments that I grow indescribably bored/tired/frustrated by America’s promises of a civilisation more advanced than anywhere else in the world.

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

If the Nassau County police department has a sliver of a conscience, they will charge every shopper (find by receipt, surveillance cameras, etc) in the death of Jdimytai and lest we forget, the architects of “spending is patriotic” George W. Bush and his administration. Of course, it won’t happen but the ones who have told us we need 50″ plasma televisions and the latest video games rather than healthy, nutritious foods and proper healthcare are complicit in this death, both of a person and of a society.

Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death [NYTimes]