Something Few Will Read

A man died today.
As he opened the gates at a Wal-Mart on Long Island, he was trampled to death by a crowd of Black Friday shoppers.

There are many ways that someone could react to this.

First, there is disgust.
I want to be disgusted. I want to be angry. I want to be justified in my hatred for those ignorant and greedy consumers who - even after they realized what had happened - did not want to stop shopping. Those people so focused on all the things, things, things that they had to buy for their parents, their children, their brothers, sisters, cousins, lovers.....all at discount prices, holiday specials, once-in-a-lifetime-deals.....that a life outside of their little world could not even register on their radar.

Are the shoppers evil people?
No, probably not. But they are blind and they are careless.
They are products. We all are.

We can't help but be influenced by the world in which we live.
TV, Radio, Internet, Blogs, Forums, Movies, News, Games, Cellphones...
The-next-big-thing.....the millennium of money....Cool America.
The more we expose ourselves to it and the harder we try to understand it only helps us to control how we personally choose to survive in it.
It's easy to make someone angry, it's very hard to make them fix the reasons for it.
Very few of us can truly change anything. We don't even know where to begin. No one person can change it on their own. No - it would take a force to change people - an industry with advertisements covering the cities reading:

"THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT, MORE BEAUTIFUL,
AND MORE TERRIBLE THINGS IN LIFE THAN THIS."

But we forget, especially around the holidays, that while people may be ultimately good - we are much more complicated creatures than that. We love being important, being the best, being loved, and being wanted. The world we live in today tells us that we can be all those things with just the right gift. We don't see this as a bad thing, we're giving someone else a present after all - but that's how the cycle begins. That's how a man's life becomes so much less important than getting that damn man-made-whatever that so-and-so has always, always wanted.

I'm not saying that we should burn (or better yet, recycle) all our material goods and create a socialism state of peace, love, and home-grown vegetables. But we should do something - what can we do?

Maybe all we can do is just care about each other a little more, and our own egos a little less.

Happy Holidays.