Black Fridays
by Fr. Roger Landry - December 5, 2008
The day after Thanksgiving was black not merely out of retailers' hope for their financial bottom line. It was black because of what happened at 5 am at the Walmart in Valley Steam, New York.
When 34 year-old employee Jdimtytai Damour was preparing to open the doors, he probably anticipated to be greeted by customers happy to have the chance for bargains. Instead, he met a mob that within seconds would trample him to death. Not content to wait for a few minutes more, the crowd ripped the doors off their hinges and stampeded into the store, shoving him to the ground and treading on him until he died. The same horde drove out of the way other employees who were trying to help him, pushed weaker and slower patrons to the floor, and even were trying to step over paramedics who had arrived to try to bring the man back to life.
It's psychologically tempting to try to classify what occurred on Long Island as a tragic but isolated incident of little relevance to our culture as a whole. But it was merely the predictable consequence of an escalating series of black Friday incidents in the past several years, when mainly elderly customers have been flattened by those who have valued obtaining a new gadget at a bargain more than others' safety or lives. This is the antithesis of the Christmas spirit. The icon of this shift was seen in the mob's shoving a woman who was eight month's pregnant … an living icon, in some sense, of another pregnant woman with a Child about to be born … out of the way in the frenzied rush, at all costs, to obtain a coveted item at reduced costs.
There has traditionally been something somewhat praiseworthy in the commercial side of Christmas, namely that people have been willing to spend their money not on selfish pursuits but on others. Purchases were an external expression of one's love for others and the desire to please them. But a growing, almost unbridled consumerism, abetted by marketing campaigns that allure throngs to spend longs nights in cold vigil outside department stores, is creating the conditions that now other human beings are being consumed in the process.
It's time for Christians, shining with the light of Christ, to dispel the now-deadly darkness of Black Friday materialist idolatry that is increasingly pervading the Christmas season.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
