Black Friday

Yesterday was Black Friday. Yesterday a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by a herd of customers (and, yes, I'm using "herd" intentionally). There were other incidents related to shopping (two people were shot to death at a Toys R Us in California), but the Wal-Mart incident is by far the most outrageous. Shootings are bad, but those are much more intentioned deaths than a trampling. I'm not discounting the tragedy of those, but I just want to examine the trampling.

A job at Wal-Mart is a pretty crappy job. So this person came in to work early the day after Thanksgiving to work a long day at a crappy place of employment. Only instead of going home that day, this person ended up dead. I don't think that any of those who trampled this person had any sort of malicious intent, it's just a sad commentary on our society that we are so engrossed in getting the big sales on Black Friday that we end up killing someone for them. How appalling! No material good is worth anyone's death. Anyone. I just hope that this might wake some people up.

**UPDATE** New information: The Wal-Mart employee who was trampled to death was a temporary worker, hired through a temp agency. Which means that he (now I know that it was a man) was earning less than Wal-Mart's already meager salary. And they're saying they can't press charges because it was not just one person but rather a crowd and it's really hard to identify anyone by the security camera. So essentially nothing will happen with this legally. (Which is yet another way the criminal justice system is unjust - shoppers who kill someone, a low-wage worker, won't get charged with any crime.)