Black Friday

I know I must be un-American in this choice: I have never participated in the mass mania of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. I'm not much of a shopper, anyway. Two hours into my doing any kind of shopping, even looking for items I need, my enthusiasm flags. One personally anxious year, I even had a panic attack in a Bath and Body Works shop. And this was at a small mall in East Texas. But there were just too many people muddling around in the narrow aisles between towers of body lotions and lip gloss. The lights were too bright, the colors almost neon, and the smiles of the clerks uncannily cheerful.

I don't understand the desire to have something so much that a person will camp out in a parking lot of a big box store. And I certainly don't understand the fury of shoppers so anxious for that special that they actually kill a store clerk. A Black Friday Stampede at a Wal-Mart in Long Island resulted in the death of a 34-year-old Walmart worker. Good God! No Guitar Hero World Tour is worth a man's life.