culture@dailylobo.com
With Thanksgiving now behind us, we have broken through to the December shopping season with Black Friday, a day marked by the worst thing about America.
Black Friday: a time when the absolute worst of humanity and America is fully, consistently and annually on display.
In Tallahassee, Fla., a man and a woman were shot in a dispute over a parking spot outside a Walmart.
In Kentwood, Mich., police pepper-sprayed shoppers throwing punches at each other at a JCPenney store at about 1:30 a.m.
In Covington, Wash., two Walmart shoppers were run down in a parking lot. Local news reported a 71-year-old drunk driver hit the couple as they were walking toward the store.
At a Sears in Texas, two customers reportedly got into a fight, sparking a stampede that injured another person. Police said a man with a concealed-carry permit pulled a gun out to get to the front of the line.
And that was just this year.
There are now endless YouTube videos nary a week old depicting mass fights between people desperate for smartphones and grabbing boxes, shoving and screaming and snatching seemingly for life itself.
A woman from Altamonte Springs, Fla., was arrested after police reported she refused to get in line and “began screaming and throwing the merchandise she was carrying to the floor.” That shopper, Samantha Chavez, is now immortalized in a short and distressing video of her rolling around on the floor screaming “I didn’t do anything” as police cuff her.
Like the certainty of drunk driving on New Year’s Eve, Black Friday is blessed with the certainty of violence. This is usually — and rather uniquely — accomplished in Black-Friday fashion through the “stompling” (a combination of “stomp” and “trample”) that occurs when the rushing deluge fights to enter a store.
Really, it’s often Walmart.
In 2008, a Walmart employee was stompled to death when a crowd of over 2,000 freezing, frenzied shoppers smashed through the store’s glass doors shortly before 5 a.m. The mob refused to stop or acknowledge the man who was crushed. Emergency personnel attempting to save him could not reach him and were pushed aside and ignored. Other people, including a pregnant woman, were injured and hospitalized after being shoved to the floor and overrun.
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It’s so shocking it resembles parody. The riots of townsfolk in “The Simpsons” shouldn’t be so terrifyingly accurate.
What is most terrifying, though, is that it is not a fluke. It isn’t random. America is a large, young country in which we are accustomed to horrifying violence, from public shootings to hate crimes to serial murders. You can argue it’s due to the “law of averages,” that with so many people, at one time or another, unreasonable acts will occur. There will always be someone crazy enough, and eventually that person will have a gun and act.
But the insanity of Black Friday isn’t random. It will happen next year, too.
