HOLIDAZASTER!

I too apologize for the pun - however, I felt this could not be let up before I angrily hurled my two cents in. If you have not read the article - based on some presumption of familiarity resulting from having "heard about this" - I urge you to take a second out of your increasingly unimportant life (i say this based on the fact that you are sitting and reading this rather than volunteering at a soup kitchen or nursing injured birds back to health) and read the article B-Fast so painstakingly linked-to. As I read this article, my already-present sense of disgust and dismay with the current American-Experience, as it were, plummeted to a new low - punctuated by comfortably-voluntary-ignorance and a hint of sulfur in the air.
Take this paragraph, for example:
By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.
You know the store opens at 5... you've been standing in line for nearly 24 hours... and NOW - FIVE MINUTES before the bargain-harlotte spreads her automatic-glass doors to be raped by the hordes of clothed-cattle, crazed by the promise of discounted appliances and 8 pound bags of Reese's pieces - NOW you decide to start beating on the door and chanting? If they had at least waited, perhaps the poor Walmart employees (who Im sure were eager to rush to work after their thanksgiving dinner on the one day of the year cashiers should wield cattleprods) could have opened the door instead of fleeing and cowering from the rain of shattered glass which heralded the onslaught of grabby-calloused fingers and payless-shoe-bottoms. The poor saps tried to fight back, pushing on the doors to prevent the inevitable tsunami of depraved-idiocy. At what point does a person want to save money on a blender SO badly, that opening hours, glass doors, human lives, and pregnant women ALL become moot points of irrelevance - paper doors on the corridor to consumer-salvation? It would be one thing if people were excited, and began to playfully jostle the doors and push, accidentally breaking them and then apologetically rushing in through the broken glass - smiling and nodding shamefully at unifromed walmarters as they flooded past them. No, instead, we have this diddy of a testimony:
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”
"Shit - dead or not - I NEED a 20 inch in my kitchen and I am NOT about to pay full price!" I mean WHAT THE FUCK people?! If I look back through the years I have been alive... and try to think of all the manias I have lived through, it's sad to note how few of them were worthy causes. Take, for example, the Tickle-Me-Elmo... or Beanie Babies... or Harry Potter. You never hear about people climbing over each other to adopt puppies or donate coats. Its always some stupid useless object.
Look, I shop at Walmart at least once a month. The savings on household goods like toilet paper and those little GLAD tupperware things... they're unbeatable. But NEVER in my time there have I ever seen anyting worth killing someone over. I know this trampling is being classified as an "accidental" death. However, I feel like the second an announcement is made notifying you fo a death in the store and you KEEP BROWSING!?!?!?! Im sorry, but if you dont feel the least bit weird shopping in the same store as a corpse... if nothing inside you tells you to stop and go see what's happened... if your only response is "i've been in line since yesterday" you are as bad as a murderer. You have officially exhibited as little, if not less-, humanity than a homicidal maniac. The second that a snowman-shaped salt-n-pepper shaker-set became more important than another life - you crossed the line from being a slack-jawed imbecile whose idea of employment is participating in a phone survey while you watch your daily two-hour block of Judge Mathis, to a magically-upright mass of cellulose with a need for fried-fare, an insatiable thirst for Cherrywine, and a bloodlust for discounts and bulk-rate shopping.
Abraham Lincoln is rolling in his lofty grave.