As many Americans slept off their post-Thanksgiving stomachaches in the wee hours of the morning last Friday, Nov. 28, Jdimytai Damour was at his temporary job at the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, Long Island. He was preparing to open the doors for the Black Friday sale just before 5am when suddenly, a mob of an estimated 2,000 people chanting "push the doors in" barreled through the front doors of the store, literally stampeding over Damour in their wake. When all was said and done, Damour was dead, and four others had to be hospitalized, including an eight-months pregnant woman.
Without a doubt, the most disturbing part of what happened at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart was what occurred after the stampede. When police officers arrived at the scene and attempted to administer CPR to Damour, they too were trampled over by customers trying to get their hands on some sale items before they ran out of stock. When police told customers to leave the store because an employee had been killed, many customers refused, saying that they had been waiting outside for hours, and that they wanted to continue their shopping.
I'd heard of mobs in China trampling over workers for cooking oil, and stampedes at religious pilgrimages in the Middle East. But in the United States? Never. Call me na've or crazy or nostalgic, but I didn't think Americans, in 2008, could ever stoop to such levels of mob violence. Boy, was I wrong. The fact that people could be so selfish and so greedy as to literally kill a man to save a few bucks on a camera or TV made my jaw drop. Thanksgiving, when we are all supposed to give thanks for what we have, had not even been in the books for five hours when Jdimytai Damour was savagely crushed and left dead. If that isn't disgusting, I'm not sure what is.
Trying to rationalize and understand what happened, I rehashed the facts in my head and told myself "okay. So maybe a few people at the front of the crowd got a little out of hand. But afterwards, everyone would pitch in and do everything they could to help the injured, right?" Nope, wrong again. It seems that all those folks in Valley Stream wanted were their discounted TV and cameras. If that meant slaughtering a man trying to earn a living, so be it.
And heaven forbid those shoppers be forced to leave Wal-Mart after the tragic incident. No way. Those sales are too good to miss, even if the store was now an active crime scene.
Immediately on Friday morning, reaction started pouring in. Many called for tighter security at Black Friday sales featuring significantly discounted merchandise. Some asked "where were the cops?" Others called for a higher quantity of sale items to be stocked on store shelves on Black Friday, which in turn might reduce the panic of shoppers to grab the last item on the shelf. Though these are all decent suggestions, what it really comes down to is the need for adults to act like adults, and human beings to treat each other as human beings.
No matter how "bad" things may be financially right now, things are still pretty great if you think about it. Those people at the Wal-Mart on Long Island had their freedom and their health. They weren't fighting for the last scrap of food in a Nazi concentration camp. They weren't fighting for a seat on the last plane out of New Orleans before Katrina. They were trying to grab an item they didn't actually need at a discounted price.
At risk of sounding corny or idealistic, the holidays are upon us, and it is time to act as such. If we can't act like adults and show compassion to each other now, when will we?
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