boycott black friday

Today is one of the many days annually when humans make asses of themselves. They rush the doors of wal*mart stores (WTF????) to save two dollars on a barbie, literally killing people in the insanity that our society has carefully cultivated with our shameless consumerism and lavish idiocy. I speak pharisaically of course, being one of the worst trangressors of said offenses (minus the killing). Economic crisis be damned, door buster advertising go to hell. This is wrong. This craziness must stop. I have to work tomorrow, and I stand convicted, accepting this as my punishment for being a participant years past in the absurd tradition we call black friday. This is the culmination of the evils of our culture. We are bad. This is wrong. I am guilty.

Last night, shortly before midnight, I drove with my sisters and Phil to Toys 'R Us, for the novel midnight opening of their black friday sale. The sight that met our eyes was unaccountably shocking and steeled my resolve to remove myself from this tradition as far as possible. We got caught in a traffic jam of circling vehicles in the TRU parking lot as they weaved in and out of the snaking line of probably 500 people, standing in the pitch dark at midnight because there were $3.99 DVDs. Or maybe it was the $12.99 transformers. Whatever it was did not justify the line that had obviously been there for hours, growing like those spongy water grow toys. (I had a mini cowboy once that someone gave me so I could grow my own boyfriend, but I discovered on rehydration that he was seriously lacking in personality, so I dried him up again.) The parking lot was overflowing, pedestrians were nearly dying on every side of us as they scurried through the parking lot on their way to the ever-amassing line. The parking lot across the street at Fugiyama's Japanese Steak House: full. Across the other street, the strip mall parking lot too was bursting at the seams as furtive shoppers dressed in tactical black and trendy pop culture camouflage darted across the four lane street that was ridiculously busy for such an ungodly hour. We immediately wrote off the great deal on Thomas the Train cars and decided it would be far better to pay full price than endure the madness, but decided to pull into Old Navy where we saw a little line straggling up to the door to find out which "door buster" deal we had missed in our ad searching. Turns out, Old Navy was opening in no less than three meager hours, and some of the champion shoppers at the door would be the lucky recipients of LEGO Rockband video games. Wait, that is a game? Because it sounds for all the world like the surreal and uncomfortable combination of two not well matched adventures. Little lego men flipping from platform to platform with electric guitars strapped to them, killing bad guys with their wicked tunes. Uhhhh,,,,,

Can we please stop this? One at a time, every non-consumer helps win the battle against a morally, ethically, technically and tragically wrong beast that we have created in our lemming -like naivete. No more. Help me.