I think I said this last year, but I find the bitching about Black Friday to be almost as tiresome as Black Friday itself. Go shopping if you want to go shopping, but honestly, the carping about how awful it all is just smacks of classism to me. Herf derf, lookit the stoopid poor people trying to get a cheap TV, how dare they?
Um, well, stores are handing out hot chocolate to people in line and advertising “door buster” sales, and allowing people to camp on their property weeks in advance, so you’ll pardon me if I reserve my contempt for the people selling the shit and creating the dangerous situation in the first place.
And the coverage never fails to make me stabby.Here we are, Bob, standing outside a Wal-Mart to interview crazed shoppers, just hoping somebody gets trampled to death for the tail end of November sweeps. It just encourages bad behavior that we can then all soberly deplore in editorials a day later. How’s about you stop covering it like it’s fucking D-Day? And by the by if I read one more asshole comment about how Kids Today just don’t stand in line for anything that matters, I will take hostages.
Kids Today, and people today, are in fact better than we think they are:
What is at times overlooked is that Occupy Wall Street was always about mutual aid. The most shared images were of protests and pepper sprays, but the scene in Zuccotti was a common kitchen, a free library, shared living space, a medical tent and endless conversations in which people listened to and learned from each other as they modeled a mutually invested society as an alternative to the culture of Big Corporations…and Big Government. Had OWS found a way to make mutual aid its loudest message, it may have found even more followers from the start.
A.