Shop till you drop

A frenzied mob of New York bargain-hunters trampled a man to death in a pre-Christmas sale. Why? 

There has been a lot of talk about greed on Wall Street in recent months, but the greed of Black Friday shoppers in the United States takes some beating. Wall Street barons may have done some wicked things, but have they, individually or en masse, physically trampled anyone to death?

That is what some main street New Yorkers managed to do last Friday in their frenzy to bag bargains at a Wal-Mart store on a day designated the “start of the holiday-shopping season” -- once known as Christmas shopping.

Before rushing ahead with “the moral of this story is” observations, let’s pause to take in exactly what kind of death 34-year-old shop worker Jdimytai Damour died. A shrieking mob of fellow human beings burst through the front doors of the store, knocked him down onto the linoleum tiles and streamed right over him and around him, injuring him and robbing him of air. He was a hefty man, 6-foot-5 and 270 pounds, but he died of asphyxiation.

It is an horrific death. Imagine the shock and terror of being hit and enveloped by that tsunami of solid flesh, pounding feet and frenzied voices -- your last conscious image of the human race.

It is an image we should not banish too quickly from our minds: human nature, blind and brutish when in the grip of some base passion.

In this case the deadly sin was covetousness, stoked by retailers and media working in cahoots, suggests the New York Times, to make Black Friday, when retailers' accounts move out of the red and into the black, “a broad cultural event” when, a decade ago, it was barely in the top 10 shopping days of the year.

But there are other vices that erode human dignity and other sectors manufacturing opportunities for indulging them. People who would not go within a mile of shopping mall on sale day might gorge themselves on expensive food, drink themselves senseless or immerse themselves in the filth of pornography. There are many ways of losing self-control and any one of them can lead to tragedy, if not death.

So, when it comes to allocating blame for last Friday’s fatality it is necessary to go beyond Wal-Mart and its inadequate security; beyond the media and its greed for advertising; beyond Wall Street, which must be guilty somehow; oh, and beyond George Bush, who seems to be responsible for everything bad in America right now.

We even have to go beyond that bloated monster, the consumer society, which has been getting a well-deserved drubbing this week. We need to think about the virtue of temperance and why some people seem to have it while others don’t.

A couple of weeks ago a British Benedictine monk and media personality, Abbot Christopher Jamison, gave a clue to the answer. Having saturated Western culture with material goods, consumerism is now taking over cultural goods such as music, and even “moral purpose”, he said. He cited the example of a section of Nike’s website called Addicts Gallery, in which runners talk about sport as their “higher purpose”. “Even our souls are now consumerised and marketing is taking over not only our material imagination but also our spiritual imagination,” the Abbot said.

He seemed to blame “business” for this, but could he not just as easily blamed his own profession? After all, people whose souls are reasonably full of spiritual things will not have much room for consumerist claptrap; it might tempt them occasionally but they will usually be able to resist. However, people need specialised help to keep their souls tuned to genuine spirituality and their behaviour virtuous -- the sort of help clergy are meant to give but so often do not.

Good on Abbot Jamison for his call to celebrate temperance during Advent, because he must realise that it means a lot of unglamorous work for him and his colleagues.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If people have nothing higher to fill their imaginations and get them out of bed in the morning than a super-discounted 42-inch flat screen television -- or, for the Wall Street crowd, a luxury yacht and a subtropical retreat -- that is what they will go after. The death of Jdimytai Damour shows where that spiritual poverty leads. It is not the only sign, of course, but it is a compelling one, and a call to action for all those who value the transcendent dimension of the human being.

Carolyn Moynihan is Deputy Editor of MercatorNet.

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