FUCK WALMART......
I'm sure you all heard about the most ridiculous tragedy, that I believe, to occur in our lifetime... a man being stomped to death by savages trying to get a cheap fucking price on a shitty labeled flat screen no one has ever heard of!!! When I heard this story about the Walmart Shoppers I was truly disgusted with humanity and as we all know the human race has done some fucked up shit in it's day and continues to all the time. But for some reason this really got to me.
How can it be possible that our consumerist ways cost a man to suffer the death of being stomped on by people that obviously felt his body crush underneath their "made in China" shoes? How can we, as a society, live with the fact that we killed or let a man die?
2,000 people rushed in through those doors that day...that's 2,000 people that chose to ignore the feel of: crushing bones, a gargled plea for help, a small grasp at their ankle, a jilt of movement from the breaking body, a sense of humanity. These people let that man suffer the unfair and painful death because they were so concerned with saving a buck.
Shame on them! Shame on Walmart! Shame on America! Shame on us!
I understood when all those people in London were crushed at a soccer game because at least then there was a sense of fear and urgency for ones life. But here the only urgency that existed was that they might not get the sale...they might not get their desired possession. So a man died for that. It's at these moments that I can see why other countries hate us. It's at these moments that I realize why they want to abolish our kind from the planet. And in a sense I couldn't agree with them more and I hate admitting that.
Now I'm not saying that I don't think what these other radicals do is deplorable because it is but what I am saying is that I can understand why they despise us for our consumer driven ways. How can anyone not? We drive around in Hummer's while nature and our environment is being destroyed....is no one else sick of this????
Machiavelli once said that he would rather take all the possessions of his enemy than kill his enemy's father because their father's death the enemy would soon forget but the loss of his possessions he would never forget.
Does the prospect that this is true about the human race frighten anyone else besides me? Does the fact that a man died so "Walmart Shoppers" could get the "Red Tag Special"? Does the simple truth that we are single-handedly killing this environment and all the other species co-existing in it bother anyone? I repeat.....
Shame on them! Shame on Walmart! Shame on America! Shame on us!
3 comments:
I too was disgusted when I heard that story. I ranted to my wife about it when I told her about it, about how I want to volunteer as security for next year's Black Friday at our local Walmart, decked out like a baseball catcher, a baseball bat in one hand and a semi-auto paintball gun in the other. I'd just stand 20 yards from the entrance and the first person who pushes gets plugged full of paintballs (which hurt immensely at close range btw). If I saw someone fall and not get helped up, out would come the bat and I'd start cracking the kneecaps of everyone I saw ignore the fallen. Yes, the story inspired such anger and revulsion in me that I found myself fantasizing about enacting my own vengeance on the pathetic worms who act in this way, as you said, for what? To save a few bucks.
We are all so doomed as a species.
Your point is well made. I'd have to ask though why one guy had the responsibility of being the barrier between marauding bargain hunters and their loot? Couldn't WalMart have arranged it so this couldn't have happened to one of their employees - or was this guy as expendable as the tube socks and cut price microwave ovens the store sells so many of.
I've been in the crushes at soccer games in Europe and they are almost always as a result of disorganized policing and stewarding. The people being crushed are not blameless, but are given a kind of 'lesser status' so whatever might be happening to them is not so bad because they're basically animals anyway. Sound familiar?
Who cares if a bunch of lard ass shoppers desperate to get into WalMart go nuts - they're not like me, much less than me and if somebody gets in their way, well...
This incident where this man was killed is as much about the value our society places on people as it is on our need for commercial goods. Iraq, Katrina, collapsing bridges - all essentially exposing the same attitude that life is cheap - nearly, but not quite as cheap as the Black Friday sales.
I wish you'd brought this up in class. You have to check out Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. He's all over this news--and he's hilarious, too.
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