kylerstone

Today is Black Friday. It is the first day of the great American shopping season and perhaps one symbol of both the holiday and our times stands above any other today: Wal-Mart. Of course, criticism of Wal-Mart is so common place at this point as to border on trite, but there's something about today's activity at the world's biggest retail store that seems all too familiar. One can only speculate about how the recession has increased the fervor and consumerism we've seen today, but the violence of Black Friday is certainly not new. In 2008, at a Wal-Mart store in Long Island, a stampede of shoppers left one employee dead and a pregnant woman hospitalized.

This year, in addition to the elderly man bloodied by police after attempting to shop-lift a video game and the myriad fights between customers over towels and DVDs, a Los Angeles Wal-Mart witnessed one customer using pepper spray to clear away a rival crowd of shoppers. At least 20 people were injured in the woman's quest for an XBox. Only days after the inhumane and unconstitutional pepper-spraying by campus police at UC Davis, today's events in L.A. remind us that oppression does not always take the form of police violence and openly dictatorial acts. They remind us that the real danger in capitalism is its ability to keep us all fighting each other for scraps and to instill consumerism where once was community. Instead of spending today struggling to tax the rich and feed the poor, millions of Americans battered each other for flat-screens and PS3s. Therefore, my Christmas wish this year is merely that we learn to put even half the effort into fighting corporate tyranny that we do into fighting our neighbors over the last waffle iron. Happy Holidays.